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 ...

This global view of Jupiter's moon, Io, was obtained during the tenth orbit of Jupiter by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Io, ...

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 ...

New evidence from an old NASA mission supports the theory that Jupiter's moon Callisto is in fact an ocean world. A moon of Jupiter about the size of Mercury likely has a several-miles-deep ocean ...

On this date, Jan. 17, 2002, the Galileo probe made it’s 33 rd pass of Jupiter’s moon, Io. After Voyager 1’s pass in 1979, Io was dubbed the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Galileo ...

PASADENA— As obsessed with germs as the most fastidious of housekeepers, NASA plans to crash its $1.5 billion Galileo into Jupiter next weekend to avoid the aging spacecraft's contaminating one of the ...

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 ...

More pocked with craters than any other object in our solar system, Jupiter's outermost and second-biggest Galilean moon, Callisto, appears geologically unremarkable. In the 1990s, however, NASA's ...