Galileo Spacecraft

The Pioneer and Voyager missions were flybys of the giant planets: they each produced only quick looks before the spacecraft sped onward. For more detailed studies of these worlds, we require spacecraft that can go into orbit around a planet. For Jupiter and Saturn, these orbiters were the Galileo, Cassini, and Juno spacecraft. To date, no orbiter missions have been started for Uranus and Neptune, although planetary scientists have expressed keen interest.

The Galileo spacecraft was launched toward Jupiter in 1989 and arrived in 1995. Galileo began its investigations by deploying an entry probe into Jupiter, for the first direct studies of the planet’s outer atmospheric layers.

The probe plunged at a shallow angle into Jupiter’s atmosphere, traveling at a speed of 50 kilometers per second—that’s fast enough to fly from New York to San Francisco in 100 seconds! This was the highest speed at which any probe has so far entered the atmosphere of a planet, and it put great demands on the heat shield protecting it. The high entry speed was a result of acceleration by the strong gravitational attraction of Jupiter.

Atmospheric friction slowed the probe within 2 minutes, producing temperatures at the front of its heat shield as high as 15,000 °C. As the probe’s speed dropped to 2500 kilometers per hour, the remains of the glowing heat shield were jettisoned, and a parachute was deployed to lower the instrumented probe spacecraft more gently into the atmosphere. The data from the probe instruments were relayed to Earth via the main Galileo spacecraft.

Galileo Probe Falling into Jupiter and Juno Image of Jupiter's South Pole. (a) This artist’s depiction shows the Galileo probe descending into the clouds via parachute just after the protective heat shield separated. The probe made its measurements of Jupiter’s atmosphere on December 7, 1995. (b) This Juno image, taken in 2017 from about 100,000 kilometers above the cloudtops, shows the south polar region of Jupiter with its dramatic complex of storms and clouds. The enhanced-color image was processed for NASA/JPL by citizen scientist John Landino. (credit a: modification of work by NASA/Ames Research Center; credit b: modification of work by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/John Landino)