Galileo (the spacecraft, not the scientist) is going to plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere tomorrow, ending its many-year exploration of that planet and its many moons. NASA is deliberately dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere in order to prevent it from accidentally hitting one of the moons, such as Europa, which may harbor life, and thereby contaminate that body with earth life that may have somehow survived the many years in deep space and Jupiter’s intense radiation fields.

This weblog has a warm feeling for the spacecraft, which had a very hard life. The picture of the earth and moon in the banner was taken by it on one of its gravity-sling encounters, in which it stole a little momentum from the earth-moon system to augment its trip to the gas giant. In its honor, I’m displaying it in this post in more detail.

I don’t like to anthropomorphize spacecraft, but it was a doughty explorer, and despite the rocky start to the mission, delivered a wealth of new information about our system’s largest planet and its satellites. May it rest in peace.

[Thanks to my web designer Bill Simon for the heads up]