Just like scientific discoveries happen every day in today's laboratories, so planetary spacecraft over the last several decades have made startling discoveries concerning the solar system we live in. In the quest for better understanding of the world and universe, Galileo, the Jovian Laboratory. The spectacular achievements of Voyager 1 and 2 as they flew past Jupiter and its satellites far exceed the capabilities of Earth-based telescopes. New discoveries heighten our awareness, raising new questions. What part do Earth and its inhabitants play in this universal scene? How is Earth different from other planets in our solar system? How are we the same? As Voyager passed Jupiter, it discovered a thin ring about the planet. What is its composition? We know there are 16 moons, are there more? Several of the satellites are composed partially of water ice. One is violently volcanic. How did these bodies form and what is their history? What can this giant planet tell us about the history of our solar system? Dr. Torrance Johnson, Project Scientist. Well, Jupiter itself, of course, we believe to be composed primarily of material that's very similar and virtually unchanged in the last four billion years to the material that formed all of the planets, the fundamental solar nebula, if you will, the gas and dust from which all of the planets formed. In addition to which the satellite system surrounding it is a magnetic field environment, make it virtually a miniature solar system. So by studying this system, we can learn a lot about how the solar system is a whole formed and something about our own origins. Galileo, the new generation spacecraft, is designed to spend an extended period of time in the Jovian system. The spacecraft will release a probe to fly its own trajectory to Jupiter. The orbiter is then targeted to its first encounter, Io, a moon known to have very active volcanoes. Then the orbiter points its relay antenna toward the probe which begins its descent into Jupiter's atmosphere. Once there, it will investigate the composition, temperatures and pressures at varying levels and send data back to the orbiter, which will retransmit it to Earth. The orbiter will loop through Jupiter's system, measuring and observing the giant magnetic field and plasma, as well as the intense radiation that surrounds Jupiter, while performing closer studies of the moons. The combination of closer encounters and advanced instrument technologies carried on board Galileo will give much better definition of surfaces than ever before. The specific major advances that we've made is in the camera system. We're using the same optical system, same telescope, if you will. The Voyager did. But instead of having a relatively slow and insensitive Vidicon tube, such as we've used in TV cameras in the 50s and 60s, instead of that at the focus of the telescope, we now have a silicon-based device, a charged couple device camera system, which gives us an increase in speed or sensitivity of the instrument of between 300 and 1000 times. That allows us to take much higher resolution pictures, much closer without blurring, and it also gives us access to a little bit of the infrared part of the spectrum that was totally inaccessible to the Voyager cameras. In addition to that, in the infrared, we have an entirely new device called the Neurinferred Mapping Spectrometer, which, if you will, is a little bit like a Landsat-type device, giving us images in many different spectral bands. And we'll have about 300 different spectral bands. What this means is we'll have from this device pictures with relatively modest resolution spatially, but with where each pixel element within the picture will have a 300 channel spectrum attached. We're going to be using this in both Jupiter and the satellites to map composition on their surfaces, study the characteristics of Jovian clouds, find out where the ises are in the surface, try to identify the materials frozen out on the surface of Iow, for instance. In route to Jupiter, Galileo will pick up energy by utilizing gravity assists while traveling once by Venus and twice by Earth. In addition to the bonus of studying these two planets and Earth's Moon, Galileo will perform close flybys on one or two asteroids, never before closely observed. Then Galileo will rendezvous with Jupiter and its moons in 1995. This unique trajectory will allow Galileo to reach its ultimate goal, returning a bananza of scientific knowledge and discoveries from Jupiter's system.