Sept. 21, 2003: NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter meets fiery end

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On Sept. 21, 2003, NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter and its moons came to an end.

On Sept. 21, 2003, NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter and its moons came to an end.

After 14 years of exploration, the Galileo spacecraft intentionally fell into Jupiter and disintegrated in the planet's dense atmosphere. Galileo launched in 1989 from the payload bay of the space shuttle Atlantis and arrived at Jupiter in 1995.

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Artist's illustration of NASA's Galileo spacecraft as it becomes a fireball plunging into Jupiter to end its mission. (Image credit: NASA)

It was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and the first to send a probe into its atmosphere. It discovered evidence of saltwater below the surfaces of three of Jupiter's moons – Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

It was purposely put on a collision course with Jupiter because it was running out of fuel, and NASA wanted to make sure that it wouldn't impact any of Jupiter's moons that could harbor life in their subsurface oceans.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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