LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Since 1989, the camera on NASA'sGalileo spacecraft has captured a comet slamming into Jupiter, volcanoeserupting on one of its moons and the first known moon orbiting an asteroid.

On Thursday, thecamera will snap its last pictures. Galileo will make its final flyby of one ofJupiter's major moons when it sweeps within 62 miles of Io.

The mission budgetdoes not cover any further pictures.

Galileo will continuemaking other scientific observations until September 2003, when the $1.4billion spacecraft is expected to slam into Jupiter in a spectacular finale.But the 70 photographs to be transmitted to Earth over the next three monthswill be the last.

They will be abittersweet reminder of a mission that was supposed to provide scientists _ andthe world _ with motion picture-like images of Jupiter's vibrant atmosphere.Because of computer glitches and other problems, Galileo never did produce themovie-quality images, but it still provided stunning and scientificallyvaluable pictures.

During 32 orbits ofJupiter, Galileo studied the planet-size moons Ganymede, Callisto, Europa andIo.

Among its discoverieswas evidence of liquid oceans beneath the surfaces of Europa and Callisto thatcould harbor life. The spacecraft also kept tabs on some of the dozens of hot,active volcanoes on Io.

In all, Galileo hasreturned about 14,000 images to Earth.

``It will be sad whenwe get to the end, but at the same time, looking back at its history, you canbe quite proud of the mission,'' Eilene Theilig, Galileo project manager atNASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The spacecraft waslaunched in 1989 from the space shuttle Atlantis and arrived in orbit aroundJupiter six years later.

Originally, Galileowas to have used its high-gain antenna to zip data back to Earth at 134kilobits per second _ more than twice the rate of a typical home dial-up modem.Scientists hoped to capture hundreds of thousands of images of Jupiter'satmosphere, stitching them together to create elaborate movies.

Instead, the antennajammed during its deployment in 1991, forcing scientists to rely on the probe'slow-gain antenna and its pokey rate of 160 bits per second. The glitch wascompounded by radiation damage to the camera and other spacecraft components.

Still, the camerapiled up the images.

In 1993, Galileocaptured the asteroid Ida at close range, allowing scientists to discover thatthe space rock had a tiny moon of its own, which they named Dactyl. A yearlater, Galileo watched as fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed intoJupiter and exploded in its atmosphere.

During Thursday'sflyby, Galileo will make its closest pass yet to any of Jupiter's moons. Itscamera should be able to capture features on Io's surface as small as 33 feetacross. It will also snatch the first peek at the moon's Jupiter-facinghemisphere since the Voyager mission in 1979.