Mission Jupiter: The Spectacular Journey of the Galileo Spacecraft PDF
Preview Mission Jupiter: The Spectacular Journey of the Galileo Spacecraft
Mission Jupiter Daniel Fischer Mission Jupiter The Spectacular Journey of the Calileo Spacecraft c COPERNICUS BOOKS An Imprint of Springer-Verlag Originally published as Mission Jupiter: Die spektakulare Reise der Raumsonde Galileo, © 1998 by Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, Switzerland. © 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. in 2001 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Copernicus Books www.copernicusbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fischer, Daniel. Mission Jupiter / Daniel Fischer; translated by Don Reneau. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4419-3158-0 ISBN 978-1-4757-4141-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-4141-4 1. Galileo Project. 2. Jupiter (Planet)-Exploration. I. Title. QB661.F57 1999 629.43'545-dc21 99-31342 Manufactured in the United States of America. Printed on acid-free paper. Text designed by Irmgard Lochner. Translated by Don Reneau. 9 8 7 6 5 432 1 ISBN 978-1-4419-3158-0 SPIN 10711962 Foreword to the Original Edition When Galileo Galelei discovered the four major moons of Jupiter in 161O-the Galilean moons, as we call them-he could hardly have dreamed that scarcely 400 years later a spacecraft named after him would be traveling there to give us a first-hand look at the gas giant and its satellites. Still, the Galileo project has to be regarded as one of the most spectacular undertakings in the history of unmanned space flight. Capturing such an enterprise in all its aspects between the cov ers of a book would seem an impossible task. It necessarily covers a quarter century of planetary research, along with the largest and most expensive interplanetary probe of its epoch making the longest v vi Foreword to the Original Edition journey to the biggest and most complicated planet in the Solar Sys tem-as well as the many discoveries it made on the way. Certain fun damentals have to be introduced, and interpretations of the data must be conveyed in detail, even while some of them have been understood by only a handful of experts. The project has had an eventful history, often experiencing fewer highs than lows, and in addition to telling that story, the very best images must be selected and explained from among a multitude of available photographs. Writing the book is in evitably accompanied by a nagging sense that most of the mass of in formation and analysis collected loses its place to something else even more important. I have received assistance from a variety of quarters, illuminating some of the specialized aspects of this enormous scientific undertak ing, even while others remained in the dark. The excitement of wit nessing raw images arriving in fragments from jupiter, shared with the public during the Voyager mission, this time was withheld. My hope, nevertheless, is that I have allowed myself to be influenced more by the relevance of particular details than by disorganization in the source base. This book covers essentially three complex areas of subject matter, presenting them in five chapters. The first concerns the lengthy chain of events leading up to the Galileo project, which is tightly interwoven with the stories of its two predecessors, the Pioneer and Voyager probes. These early adventures in the jovian system lie over two decades in the past now, making it more than appropriate to recall in some detail their path-breaking careers in space flight. Doing so sup plies an occasion for presenting the basics about jupiter and the sys tem surrounding it, the same facts underlying the scientific conception of the Galileo project. The result is a survey of the lengthy develop ment of the Galileo mission, from its now-forgotten beginnings to its repeatedly delayed launch date. From there we move through a long Foreword to the Original Edition vii list of difficulties-and an equal number of triumphs-over the course of a six-year journey to the giant planet. Arrival day is presented, along with the major discoveries made by Galileo's atmospheric probe. Even now, two years after the probe's brief and intense encounter with the gas giant, scientists are still at work analyzing the complex data. Galileo spent 1996 and 1997 observing whatever came in range of its sensors, based, of course, on an orbital trajectory calculated with the utmost precision. The nature of the chronology changes at this point, when we turn to the book's central focus on all of Galileo's dis coveries during its two-year primary mission through the Jovian sys tem. Among them are discoveries aboutjupiter's four major and many minor moons, about Jupiter itself, its ring and powerful magneto sphere. The last part of the book ventures an overall view of the Jovian system, which like all scientific statements is necessarily provisional. With a parting look at the extension of the Galileo project through 1999, at the quite comparable Cassini mission to Saturn, and ideas for future Jupiter missions, the book comes to an end. I had been planning a book on Jupiter for a long time, but 1998 seems to have been the right time to get started on it. The primary mis sion is now history, even though the two-year extension of the mission has since gotten under way. The steady stream of new images has let up, and it is time to strike a balance, which, incidentally, is what scien tists are doing as well. By now the first in-depth examinations of the central questions have already come out in scientific journals, and in any case the thought of waiting for all the data to be analyzed is as utopian as ever. Twenty years follOwing the Pioneer and Voyager visits to Jupiter, new analyses of those data are still being published. The beginnings of the Galileo project lie so far in the past by now that it was often hard to locate either documents about or witnesses to the events in question. Particularly useful in reconstructing the history of the project were contemporaneous articles written by Wolfgang viii Foreword to the Original Edition Engelhardt. My chronology of the mission from 1986 to 1997 is based on countless publications in the technical journals of both the natural sciences and the space flight industry, as well as on status reports and press releases from mission managers. The latter sources, fortunately, I had already processed into a series of articles for Sterne und Weltraum and Skyweek-otherwise, it might have taken me years to subdue the mountain of documentary material. Also part of the story are scientific publications on the various discoveries of planetary objects along Galileo's way, the sometimes up-to-the-minute reports of findings at the international conferences of planetary scientists in 1992, 1996, and 1997, and the Baltimore conference on the crash of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1995. Invaluable firsthand information came, as always, from the press conferences on Galileo's discoveries held by NASA, which I was able to follow either live via NASA's special televi sion channel or through reports by third parties. For their assistance I would especially like to thank Ms. Susanne Huttemeister (at the time, of Cambridge, Massachusetts) as well as the friendly staff at the European Space Agency's headquarters in Paris, who made it possible for me to follow developments either by record ing NASA television via ISDN or even, the night Galileo arrived at Jupiter, allowing me to experience the events in real time. Many inter esting tangents to my primary material came from this source, and but for my encounters there, they would not have found their way into the printed literature. For a depiction of the personal dramas that are also part of the history of the Galileo project, there was simply not enough room. When the narrative turns to the failure of critical systems-the main antenna and the onboard tape recorder, for example-and to des perate efforts of scientists and engineers to save the mission, I hope readers will be able to put themselves in the place of a Galileo "tiger team" and feel the special drama of these weeks. The same, of course, also applies to the steadily increasing number of triumphs. Foreword to the Original Edition ix Thanks are due to many people who contributed individual details to this overall depiction of the Galileo mission, in the case of some during the final days the manuscript was being prepared. Deserving of special mention are Fritz Neubauer of the University of Cologne, Ger many, who made himself available for an interview in the midst of an important conference, the dust researchers working with Eberhard Grun, who steered much valuable material my way, and the Washing ton editorial staff of Nature, who faxed parts of the latest publications the day before the book went to press. Very special thanks, finally, to the book's editor and publisher for sensibly allowing what was ideal for the contents of the book to determine the publication schedule. Daniel Fischer Konigswinter, March 1998 Foreword to the English Edition Published almost three years after the German edition, the English version has been updated in numerous places in the "Looping from Moon to Moon" and "What the Future Holds" sections-the latter with the help ofJim Erickson, project manager until early 2001. New scientific inSights were added that had become available from recent publications and through picture and press releases, and about 25 interesting black and white images were included, without sacrificing earlier material. The very latest developments of 1999,2000, and early 2001 are being presented as progress reports at the end of several sub chapters. While few of the earlier conclusions have been overturned xi xii For e W 0 r d tot h e Eng lis h E d i t ion completely by the continuing analysis so far, some mysteries have deepened. At the same time, other aspects of the Jovian system have become surprisingly clear. Since the middle of 2000, for example, the existence of an ocean of a salty liquid under the icy crust of the moon Europa can be considered proven, thanks to Galileo's magnetometer. As this edition goes to press in the year 2001, Galileo is still alive and well and has just completed yet another mission milestone: joint ob servations of Jupiter's vast magnetosphere, together with that other outer planets explorer Cassini, which is on its way to Saturn. And if no major electronic failure kills the spacecraft, its mission will continue well into 2003, to be ended in a controlled fashion by sending Galileo right into jupiter's atmosphere. Yet more discoveries can be expected when the orbiter makes some more close flybys of the moons Callisto, 10, and perhaps Amalthea during its final orbits, as its epic journey draws to a close. Galileo has already changed mankind's view of the largest planet of the Solar System and its companions forever. Enjoy the trip! Daniel Fischer Kbnigswinter, March 2001
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