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Galileo Nearing Its End

Posted by michael on from the look-out-below dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Mission operations for the Galileo space probe, currently orbiting Jupiter, are scheduled to be shut down at the end of this month. Once a month thereafter scientists will check on the probe until September when the probe will be ordered to crash into Jupiter. The $1.5 billion mission met 70 percent of its science objectives and made a number of serendipitous discoveries along the way -- despite a range of problems."

7 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. The answer to all your questions is... by Froze · · Score: 4, Informative

    R...T...F...A...

    And I quote
    " Galileo could be allowed to simply remain in orbit, but scientists feared it might collide with Europa and contaminate that body with microbes from Earth, possibly damaging its environment. "

    This is an entirely valid concern, think the andromeda strain only inverted.

    --
    -- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
    1. Re:The answer to all your questions is... by Bobas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I just wonder how much we might have "contaminated" already. Dozen of probes have been to Mars and Venus.

  2. This sounds an awful lot like... by devphil · · Score: 3, Funny


    ...the way my cars usually go. They run and run and run, and eventually start falling apart so fast that I just check on them once every so often, and eventually crash them into something just to finish the damn thing off.

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
  3. ST by QEDog · · Score: 4, Funny

    they have to crash it... haven't you seen the Star Trek movie about Vger?

    --
    "There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
  4. Someones gonna get angry by jak0b · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just know that this is going crash into the mayor of Jupiteria's house and start an intergalactic war. (or would that be inter-solarsystemic war?)

  5. Re:Only 70%? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Once you've grown up a bit more, you find out that sometimes 70% is just amazingly good. I've had college classes were the top scores were under 50%. They just lob soft balls to high school kids, because they don't want them to get frustrated and quit.

    If Galileo has achieved 100% of it goals, it would be clear they hadn't planned a hard enough mission. Just like if too many students get 100%, the test isn't hard enough to tell you which students are better.

  6. Re:Expensive. by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Insightful
    > I'm not going to debate cost effectiveness or anything (space science is quite over my head), but it is interesting that 30% of 1.5 billion dollars is 450 million dollars (imagine what I could do with even 1 percent of that...).

    Cheap.

    $1.5B - three shuttle launches to put some ISS modules together. Of the three ISS crew members, 2.5 person-days are required to keep the thing up, leaving one guy able to spend four hours a day... doing very little science.

    $1.5B - plunk a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, find out what's below the cloud tops, make multiple passes by every moon, and get pictures/magnetometer data of everything around Jupiter and each of its moons. Prove the existence of liquid water beneath Europa, demonstrate a liquid/slush ocean on Callisto, observe volcanoes on Io, and if you're just after pretty pictures, keep in mind that had Galileo's high-gain antenna actually worked, we'd have gotten thousands of times as many pictures as we did.

    Naw, scrap that science stuff. It's only good for a couple of years of billion-dollar pork while it's under construction, but once it's in the air, it's just a few million bucks worth of lousy scientists. Screw that. We need more shuttle/ISS flights, because they're the only things that can keep that gigadollar NASA contractor pork flowing for decades.