Galileo at Jupiter: First Results

Abstract

On the occasion of this historic meeting in Padua, it is interesting to speculate about how Galileo himself would have viewed these proceedings. I can easily imagine him coming into one of the sessions and conducting a little examination to bring himself up to date. What experiments are you doing? Why are you doing them? What have you learned? Despite the intervening centuries, I think it would have been very easy to describe to Galileo what we are doing. There would be a few things he would have to catch up on, for instance: quantum theory, high energy physics, and radio communications. I am sure he would also be very interested in the work our mission designers have done on the use of gravitational assists for our trajectories. However, many of the fundamentals are still the same as they were in Galileo’s time. He certainly would understand why we want to understand. He would recognize that we are still asking many of the questions he was interested in—what are the planets, what are they made of, how did they form, what has happened to them since they formed. In this brief discussion of the preliminary results from the spacecraft named for the great astronomer/physicist I hope to convey some of the excitement and wonder of new discovery which motivated our illustrious predecessor. I hope and believe that Galileo would have been pleased with what we have done with his spacecraft.