In the end, it was the hint of life on an icy moon that doomed the Galileo spacecraft to a fiery death. This afternoon, the NASA spacecraft will end its 2.8-billion-mile odyssey with a suicidal plunge ...

LOS ANGELES - Since 1989, the camera on NASA's Galileo spacecraft has captured a comet slamming into Jupiter, volcanoes erupting on one of its moons and the first known moon orbiting an asteroid. On ...

In a mission that changed our understanding of gas giants, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft made history not just in orbit but also in its dramatic descent into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Launched in October 1989 ...

Half a billion miles away, a lone emissary from Earth will carry out its own death sentence today when it screams into the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter at 108,000 mph and gets vaporized. The ...

To get somewhere in outer space, you can’t exactly drive in a straight line. Orbits are tricky things, and sending a probe to a faraway planet involves lots of loop-de-loops around other planets on ...

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface “ocean” of magma–either molten or partially molten–beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. The finding, from a ...