End of the Road

The spacecraft Galileo has endured a lot: launch delays, environmentalist protests (it carries a small amount of plutonium as a power source), and, after it was finally launched from the space shuttle, a malfunctioning tape recorder and a faulty radio antenna that cut its data transmission rate by a factor of 840. In the six years since it was launched, Galileo has been spiraling through the inner solar system, looping by Earth twice for gravity boosts, on a 2.35-billion-mile trajectory that may well be the most circuitous route ever taken by anyone or anything to get anywhere. But on the way, the scrappy probe delivered the goods: a look at the dark side of the moon, the first close-up of an asteroid, and a spectacular view of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. And by the time you read this, Galileo may finally have gotten where it’s going. On December 7--after this issue ...