Galileo's Final Blaze of Glory

EccentricAnomaly writes: "CNN reports that the Galileo spacecraft is about to perform its last flyby of Io. Galileo will skim a mere 100 km above Io to enter a trajectory that crashes into Jupiter in 2003. This is to avoid the spacecraft running out of fuel and accidentally crashing into Europa which might contaminate it with any bacteria spores on Galileo. This is a real concern - Apollo 12 found bacteria on Surveyor 3 that survived two and a half years on the moon."

Comments

Think BIG

[mAsterdam]

"..This is to avoid the spacecraft running out of fuel and accidentally crashing into Europa which might contaminate it with any bacteria spores on Galileo. This is a real concern - Apollo 12 found bacteria on Surveyor 3 that survived two and a half years on the moon." Let me get this straight. They risk contaminating Jupiter in order to prevent contaminating Europa?
I'm speechless.

NASA Is A Murderer...This is Not A Troll

[cybrpnk]

NASA is getting really good at crashing stuff and turning it off on purpose. Not too long ago it was the Deep Space 1 probe, which was set up to go by an asteroid after a successful comet flyby- oops, no more money for that. Since it was in deep space, they couldn't find anything to crash it into, I'm surprised they didn't slam it into the comet just for the hell of it. Before DS1, NASA crashed the NEAR Shoemaker into Eros because the mission budget was exhausted on that one. Before THAT was the lunar orbiter Clementine, which could have kept mapping neutrons over the moons poles and refining our understanding of extremely valuable ice lurking in shadows there. Before THAT NASA destroyed the Magellan Venus probe by commanding it to do an "aerobraking experiment". As a kid I dreamed about space probes orbiting the Moon and Venus and Jupiter and Eros and comets. Now as an adult, I watch NASA crash functioning probes into these places not because they have outlived their usefulness but because we have become so bored with them we don't care enough to pay for their upkeep. If I were an astronaut on a Mars mission, I'd be scared to death that halfway thru the mission, the'd turn off the deep space tracking and communications net to save money. And this is all because of Space Station sucking every available dollar and then billions more out of other areas of the NASA program.....