Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Goodbye, Galileo

Posted by timothy on from the and-columbus dept.

deglr6328 writes "On the 21st of this month the Galileo Space Probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly eight years, will plummet fatefully into the crushing pressures and searing heat of that planet's interior. The spacecraft's 14 year journey has brought the discovery of, among other things, the first moon orbiting an asteroid, the first remote detection of life on earth when Carl Sagan used data from an onboard infrared spectrometer to observe the spectral signature of Oxygen in our atmosphere, it has caught snowflakes of Sulfur Dioxide as it flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on Io, snapped pictures of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere and most importantly, provided proof a >60 Km deep ocean on Europa with hints of oceans on Callisto and Ganymede(listen to Ganymede's eerie sounding plasma wind). And all this with scarcely more computing power than a late '70s video game and a maximum data transfer rate of ~120 bits/s over a distance of more than 600 million Km. In a mission spanning three decades, the Galileo space probe has answered many of humanity's questions about space and presented us with the knowledge to ask many more which will be answered by the next generation of Jovian explorer. Goodnight Galileo."

4 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. This shows how geeky Im am... by epicstruggle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but I would rather have a replica of this space probe in schools/colleges than any number of sports trophies. The amount of hard work and dedication required to do things like this should inspire our youths, instead of their current role models (kobe bryant, et al.)

    later,
    epic

    --
    "Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
    1. Re:This shows how geeky Im am... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sports make money for schools, science doesn't.

      Very sad, but true.

  2. It's not the size. It's how you use it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    all this with scarcely more computing power than a late '70s video game

    When it comes to real engineering, the fewer resources you need to meet your goals, the better of a job you did. Throwing in larger processors just to you can brag about the power of a Beowulf cluster of those is just a poor job.

    Less is more.

  3. Building them like they used to by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Galileo was not cheap. Neither were the Pioneers or the Voyagers. Look at the return on the investment, though.

    NASA has not made a good argument for cheaper = better. The Hubble Space Telescope was flawed when it went up and spent the first three years of its lifespan doing very little compared to its design. We have lost several probes headed Mars. Quality has not been top priority at NASA, and until it is, we're going to continue to see failure after failure, I'm afraid. Galileo wasn't perfect, with deployment problems of its high-gain antenna, but it did not fail entirely, and it did not require humans in suits to go play with it for it to work right. We need that kind of engineering again.

    We need to build them like we used to.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.