On December 7, 1995, spacecraft Galileo completed its 6 year journey to Jupiter and began exploring the giant planet and its moons. Galileo's voyage through the inner solar system included close flybys of Venus, the Earth and Moon, and two main-belt asteroids, Gaspra and Ida, the first such small bodies to be imaged by a spacecraft. Upon arrival at its final destination, an instrumented probe penetrated deep beneath the cloud tops of Jupiter, relaying the first direct measurements of the atmosphere below to the Galileo Orbiter for later transmission to Earth. The Orbiter itself passed 892 km above the surface of Jupiter's violent moon Io before beginning a 2 year, 11 orbit mission in the jovian system which will include detailed study of Jupiter's atmosphere and magnetosphere and close flybys of the icy worlds Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
The Galileo Orbiter carries a total of 10 scientific instruments, including 4 remote sensing systems sensitive to wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to thermal infrared and 4 experiments monitoring particles and fields. The "eye" of Galileo is the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system, an 800 x 800 element silicon CCD camera sensitive to visible and near-infrared wavelengths with an 8-position filter wheel and optics inherited from the Voyager mission. Processing and analysis of the SSI images takes place both at JPL, which manages the mission for NASA, and at various Home Institution Image Processing Systems (HIIPS) associated with Galileo Imaging Team members at 16 institutions in 3 countries. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory's Galileo HIIPS is located at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is under the direction of Professor Richard Greenberg.
Our Web pages present imaging products from Galileo and in support of the Galileo project that were developed here at the LPL Galileo HIIPS.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
National Space Science Data Center
SSI Public Outreach Page