The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

A team led by Markus Landgraf, at the European Space Operation Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, has found that two to three times more stardust is pouring into the Solar System than at the end of the 1990s. The influx may be due to the system entering a region of dense cloud.

“Our Sun is about to join our closest stellar neighbour Alpha Centauri in its cloud,” the European Space Agency said. It takes more than 70,000 years to traverse a typical interstellar cloud.

Goodbye Galileo

Galileo was launched from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989. It was an unmanned probe which was sent to Jupiter to bring back information, and was named after the astronomer, Galileo Galilei, who had first observed Jupiter’s moons in 1610.

The Galileo spacecraft’s 14-year odyssey finally came to an end on Sunday, 21 September 2003. The spacecraft passed into Jupiter’s shadow then disintegrated in the planet’s dense atmosphere at 11:57 am Pacific Daylight Time. The Deep Space Network tracking station in Goldstone, California, received the last signal at 12:43:14 PDT, the delay being due to the time it took for the signal to travel to Earth.

Hundreds of former Galileo project members and their families were present at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for a celebration to bid the spacecraft goodbye.

Dr Claudia Alexander, Galileo project manager said:

“We learned mind-boggling things. This mission was worth its weight in gold.”

Having travelled approximately 4.6 billion kilometres (about 2.8 billion miles), the hardy spacecraft endured more than four times the cumulative dose of harmful Jovian radiation it was designed to withstand. During a previous fly-by of the moon Amalthea in November 2002, flashes of light were seen by the star scanner that indicated the presence of rocky debris circling Jupiter in the vicinity of the small moon. Another measurement of this area was taken today during Galileo’s final pass, further analysis of which may help confirm or constrain the existence of a ring at Amalthea’s orbit.

Dr Torrance Johnson, Galileo project scientist:

“We haven’t lost a spacecraft, we’ve gained a stepping stone into the future of space exploration.”