Galileo Proves Old Data Can Still Yield New Tricks

Galileo captured this view of Jupiter’s moon Europa in the late 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.

Yesterday NASA announced that it appears the Galileo spacecraft, which launched toward Jupiter in 1989 and arrived in 1995, flew through a plume of the moon Europa. This discovery was made using 20-year-old data from Galileo’s magnetometer, an instrument that measures the strength of magnetic fields. Scientists, led by Xianzhe Jia, were inspired to go back and look at this data set from Galileo after…