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Witness History

The Galileo project

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Galileo mission to examine the planet Jupiter had its beginnings in the 1970s. It finally came to an end on 21st September 2003. Professor Fred Taylor is one of the few scientists who worked on it from start to finish and he has been telling Dan Whitworth about some of the highs and lows of the project.

Photo: The Galileo Jupiter probe being tested before launch. Credit:Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Dan Whitworth.

0:40.0

In September 2003, one of the most remarkable missions of space exploration came to a fiery end.

0:46.8

The spacecraft Galileo was sent hurtling into Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring its destruction. Having completed a 14-year mission, it had taught

0:55.9

scientists things about the solar system's largest planet and its four large moons that

1:01.4

was simply a mystery before.

1:03.7

I've been speaking to one of the scientists who worked on it.

1:06.7

The end of the mission wasn't as tragic as it might sound because we knew years ahead

1:11.0

that it was going to end then. So it was just inevitable. We were just

1:15.1

resigned to that, but it was a happy time really. Professor Fred Taylor is one of the

1:19.5

few scientists who worked on the Galileo project from start to finish 30 years in all.

1:25.0

To begin with, he was based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California,

1:29.5

home of America's planetary exploration,

1:32.2

and then remotely from Oxford University.

1:35.0

The first few years were spent trying to get the project commissioned and creating the scientific

1:39.4

experiments that would find answers to the questions they had about Jupiter.

...

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