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From today's featured article

Artist's impression of Galileo's arrival at Jupiter

The Galileo project was an American robotic space program that studied Jupiter and its moons (including Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), as well as several other Solar System bodies. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, the Galileo spacecraft consisted of an orbiter and an atmospheric entry probe. It was launched in 1989 by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-34 mission. Despite suffering major antenna problems, Galileo achieved the first asteroid flyby (of 951 Gaspra), discovered the first asteroid moon (Dactyl, around 243 Ida), and observed Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9's collision with Jupiter. After gravity-assisted flybys of Venus and Earth, Galileo became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. It then launched the first probe to directly measure Jupiter's atmosphere. In 2003, the mission was terminated by sending the orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere to eliminate the possibility of contaminating the Jovian moons with terrestrial bacteria. (Full article...)

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