May 25 2001
From The Space Library
Continuing to gather data long after it had completed its original mission, the Galileo spacecraft made the closest ever pass of Jupiter’s largest moon, Callisto. Although regarded as the ugly duckling of Jupiter’s moons because it does not appear to have ever had liquid water present, Callisto still interested scientists who hoped to gather enough data to determine the size and number of craters on the moon’s surface. In the days leading up to the close pass of Callisto, problems with Galileo’s cameras had worried NASA controllers. Galileo scientists had anticipated the complications, however, predicting that the flyby, within 100 miles (161 kilometers) of the moon, would expose the probe to strong gravitational pulls and radiation belts. Galileo had originally begun orbiting Jupiter in 1995 and had already made 30 flybys of Jupiter’s largest moons. (SpaceRef.com, “Galileo Millennium Mission Status,” 24 May 2001, http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid= 2913 (accessed 30 July 2001); NASA, “Galileo Gets One Last Close Encounter with Jupiter’s Callisto,” news release 0 1-97, 22 May 2001.)
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