This is planetary radio. Ladies and gentlemen we present Galileo Galileo Galilee.

In our time it has pleased God to concede to human ingenuity an invention so wonderful as to have the power of increasing vision

four, six, ten, twenty, 30 or even 40 times.

And so an infinite number of objects which were invisible,

either because of distance or extreme minuteness have become visible by means of the telescope.

I tell you, I have discovered four stars, neither known nor observed by anyone before me,

and not of the common sort and multitude of the less notable fixed stars, but of the illustrious order of

wandering stars. And these four new ones make their journeys and orbits with a

marvelous speed around the star of Jupiter, the most noble

wonder of them all.

Those were Galileo's words brought to life by the distinguished actor John Reese Davies.

You may have most recently seen him playing Gimley the Dwarf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy,

but there was nothing small about his performance this time. He gave it

at the historic Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California before an audience that had come

to celebrate Galileo the man and Galileo the spacecraft, or rather those

latter-day Galileo's who are adding to our body of knowledge about the universe.

Welcome to a special edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

It was just a day after the Galileo probe had plunged into Jupiter, sent to a fiery death to avoid contamination of other

bodies, including the Galilean Moon Europa.

The Planetary Society wanted to mark the end of this marvelously successful and dramatic

mission with a little drama of its own.

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