🛰️ Mission
Galileo
Fourteen years at Jupiter, and a probe dropped into its clouds.
- Launched
- 18 October 1989, 37 years ago
- Worked for
- 13 years, until 21 September 2003
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Steered into Jupiter on purpose, to keep its moons clean
- Best known for
- Found strong evidence for an ocean of salty water under the ice of Europa
Did you know?
- Its main antenna never opened, so it sent everything home through a small back-up one, a few hundred bits a second.
- It dropped a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995. The probe survived 58 minutes before the pressure crushed it.
Where it went
Jupiter
The biggest planet, with a storm larger than Earth.
Callisto
The most heavily cratered world in the solar system.
Europa
An icy moon hiding a salty ocean underneath.
Io
The most volcanic world in the solar system.
More NASA photos of GalileoStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.