Postcards From the Edge

Few space probes have had worse luck than Galileo. Built with late-1970s technology to explore Jupiter and its planet-size moons, it arrived some seven years late in the wake of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. Finally sent on its way in 1989, but with a low-power rocket, it was saddled with a convoluted 2.4-billion-mile slingshot trajectory that took more than six years to complete. Along the way the orbiter's giant primary antenna refused to deploy, and its antiquated tape-drive memory system jammed.