Galileo

The solar sys­tem’s great­est explor­er will per­ish in a kamikaze dive into the solar sys­tem’s biggest plan­et late tomor­row. It detect­ed a salt­wa­ter ocean under the ice of Europa…and an unex­pect­ed mag­net­ic field around the largest [of Jupiter’s satel­lites], Ganymede. The mis­sion was meant to last a cou­ple of years. Alto­geth­er, Galileo spent 14 years away from Earth. It was designed to sur­vive only so much of the fierce radi­a­tion from Jupiter before it failed: it absorbed four times the planned amount and kept on send­ing pho­tographs and data back to mis­sion con­trol at Pasade­na, California. 

…It sped past Io as a giant foun­tain of fire erupt­ed from its vol­canic sur­face, and it detect­ed liq­uid salt­wa­ter on Ganymede and Cal­lis­to. And it did all this with a tem­pera­men­tal tape recorder, a main com­mu­ni­ca­tions anten­na that failed to deploy, an onboard com­put­er of the kind used to play Pac-man games, and the spare pow­er to light up a 60-watt bulb.

Pulled from out­o­fam­bit, Diane Duane’s blog