Galileo's Flyby of Almathea

An anonymous reader writes "The spectacular Galileo flybys of Jupiter, Europa and Io are largely credited with the discovery of frozen water ice and some of the earliest examples of non-solar (tidal) heating anywhere in our solar system. For the next 10 days, Galileo scientists are preparing for their next target: probing one of Jupiter's moons, Almathea, at the close-up range of 100 miles. Almathea is one of the most unusual moons in the solar system, because it gives off more heat than it receives from the Sun."

Comments

Leaves me feeling depressed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I read stories on Galileo I get an incredable feeling of depression, not because the mission has been a failure, it has not. Rather that the craft never reached its full potentual. Early in the mission, the main arial to earth never opened meaning that the amount of pictures we get now are much lower then what we should have gotten, Sometimes I think that Galileo could have been the mission which found life on another planet besides earth. This would have changed everything, instead of planning wars today we would be planing probes to discover what the hell was out there.(a real long shot). Things like the pluto express would not have been cancelled, and millions would not be wasted on the ISS - a project which gets all its money just from the cool factor, and like the shuttle a complete waste of resources.

Probes are the way to go, its just a pity that for every one sent few manage to survive the trip, the payoff is so great.