NASA Celebrates the End of One of Its Most Successful Missions - 2003-09-22

NASA deliberately crashed one of its precious spacecraft into the planet Jupiter, destroying it. Mansour Farasioon, a scientific reporter for Voice of America, interviews Dr. Firouz Naderi, the Mars Exploration Program Manager at NASA, to explain the reasons behind this destructive action. The American space agency, NASA, commemorates the end of one of its most successful missions after the spacecraft 'Galileo' was intentionally burned up in Jupiter's atmosphere. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California lost contact with the spacecraft on Sunday. NASA sent the aging 'Galileo' into Jupiter's thick atmosphere to prevent it from colliding with one of the planet's moons and contaminating it with Earth microbes. During its 14-year mission, Galileo sent thousands of images and data about the largest planet in the solar system back to Earth. NASA scientists state that the spacecraft traveled 4.6 billion kilometers and was the first spacecraft to directly measure Jupiter's atmosphere. The Galileo spacecraft also discovered evidence of oceans on three of Jupiter's moons - Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. The spacecraft is named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed Jupiter's moons through a telescope in the 17th century.