?Evidence exists that Europa Wholesale Jerseys Free Shipping , Ganymede, and Callisto all have a thin atmospheric layer known as a 'surface-bound exosphere'.
?Jupiter's ring system is formed by dust kicked up as interplanetary meteoroids smash into the planet's four small inner moons. The outermost ring is actually two rings, one embedded with the other. There is probably a separate ring along Amalthea's orbit, as well.
The Galileo spacecraft identified the global structure and dynamics of a giant planet's magnetosphere.
The star scanner was a small optical telescope used to provide the spacecraft with an absolute attitude reference. It was also able serendipitously to make scientific discoveries. In the prime mission Wholesale Jerseys From China , it was found that the star scanner was able to detect high energy particles as a noise signal. These data were eventually calibrated to show the particles were predominantly > 2 MeV electrons that were trapped in the Jovian magnetic belts.
A second discovery occurred in 2000. The star scanner was observing a set of stars which included the second magnitude star Delta Velorum. At one point, this star dimmed for 8 hours below the star scanner's detection threshold. Subsequent analysis of Galileo data and work by amateur and professional astronomers showed that Delta Velorum is the brightest known eclipsing binary, brighter at maximum than even Algol. It has a primary period of 45 days and the dimming is just visible with the naked eye.
A final discovery occurred during the last two orbits of the mission. When the spacecraft passed the orbit of Jupiter's moon Amalthea, the star scanner detected unexpected flashes of light that were reflections from moonlets. None of the individual moonlets were sighted twice Wholesale Jerseys China , hence no orbits were determined and the moonlets did not meet the International Astronomical Union requirements to receive designations. It is believed that these moonlets most likely are debris ejected from Amalthea and form a tenuous, and perhaps temporary, ring.
The late Carl Sagan, pondering the question of whether life on Earth could be easily detected from space Wholesale Jerseys , devised a set of experiments in the late 1980s using Galileo's remote sensing instruments to determine if life indeed could be detected during the first Earth flyby of the mission in December 1990. After data acquisition and processing, Sagan et al. published a paper in Nature in 1993 detailing the results of the experiment. Galileo had found what are now referred to as the "Sagan criteria for life"; these were: strong absorption of light at the red end of the visible spectrum (especially over continents) which was caused by absorption by chlorophyll in photosynthesizing plants, absorption bands of molecular oxygen which is also a result of plant activity, infrared absorption bands caused by the ~1 micromole per mole (μmolmol) of methane in Earth's atmosphere (a gas which must be replenished by either volcanic or biological activity) and modulated narrowband radio wave transmissions uncharacteristic of any known natural source. Galileo's experiments were thus the first ever controls in the newborn science of astrobiological remote sensing.
In December 1992 during Galileo's second gravity assist planetary flyby of Earth Cheap Baseball Jerseys , another groundbreaking yet almost entirely unpublicized experiment was done using Galileo to assess the possibility of optical communication with spacecraft by detecting pulses of light from powerful lasers which were to be directly imaged by Galileo's CCD. The experiment, dubbed Galileo OPtical EXperiment or GOPEX, used two separate sites to beam laser pulses to the spacecraft, one at Table Mountain Observatory in California and the other at the Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico. The Table Mountain site used a frequency doubled Neodymium-Yttrium-Aluminium Garnet (Nd:YAG) laser operating at 532 nm with a repetition rate of ~15 to 30 Hz and a pulse power (FWHM) in the tens of megawatts range Cheap MLB Jerseys , which was coupled to a 0.6 meter Cassegrain telescope for transmission to Galileo; the Starfire range site used a similar setup with a larger transmitting telescope (1.5 m). Long exposure (~0.1 to 0.8 s) images using Galileo's 560 nm centered green filter produced images of Earth clearly showing the laser pulses even at distances of up to 6,000,000 km. Adverse weather conditions, restrictions placed on laser transmissions by the U.S. Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC) and a pointing error caused by the scan platform acceleration on the spacecraft being slower than expected (which prevented laser detection on all frames with less than 400 ms exposure times) all contributed to the reduction of the number of successful detections of the laser transmission to 48 of the total 159 frames taken. Nonetheless Cheap Jerseys Free Shipping , the experiment was considered a resounding success and the data acquired will likely be used in the future to design laser "downlinks" which will send large volumes of data very quickly, from spacecraft to Earth. The scheme is already being studied (as of 2004) for a data link to a future Mars orbiting spacecraft.
On October 29, 1991, two months after entering the asteroid belt Cheap Jerseys From China , Galileo performed the first ever asteroid encounter by passing about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from 951 Gaspra at a relative speed of about 8 kilometers per second (18,000 mph). Several pictures of Gaspra were taken along with measurements using the NIMS instrument to indicate composition and physical properties. The last (and best) two images were played back to Earth in November 1991 and June 1992. The imagery revealed a cratered and very irregular body about 19 by 12 by 11 kilometers (12 by 7.5 by 7 miles). The remainder of data taken Cheap Jerseys , including low resolution images of more of the surface, were transmitted in late November 1992.