Earlier Missions Exploring Jupiter

(Earlier Missions Exploring Jupiter)

1.Pioneer 10 - 1973: The first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and skim the atmosphere of jupiter . It sent visual of Jupiter 's moons , existence of the radiation belt and presence of magnetosphere . However ,the intense and unexpected radiation belt that it encountered gave rise to functional errors and erroneous readings.

2.Pioneer 11 -  1974: This was principally launched with saturn as the target; 12 month after the first craft, Pioneer 11 reached Jupiter. This to was a flyby mission and it sent back visuals of the moons, fluid nature of the interior of the planet, magnetosphere and atmosphere. Both Pioneers paved way for further advancements in th construction of spacecraft.

4.Voyager 1 - 1979: Another flyby mission sent images of the moons, rings and magnetic fields. This was a very short flyby of 48 hours and hence not many details obtained. However at a closed distance of 349000 km from the center, it gave spectacular imagery.

4.Voyager 2 -  1979: On its way to saturn and Pluto, Voyager 2 reached the cloud tops of Jupiter closer than the previous probe. This flyby mission sent clear images of volcanic activity on lo, tectonic plates of Ganymade and creaters of callisto. These visuals helped scientists to further improve the technology of spacecrafts.

5.Ulysses - 1992: Ulysses, a solar probe, used Jupiter as gravity assist to proceed fuerther in its journey. During this, it recorded the magnetosphere. The gravity of Jupiter deviated its path from the calculated value and hence again, Ulysses visited the planet, this time farther away and made more recordings. Since the probe had no cameras, no images were taken.

6.Galileo Orbiter - 1998 to 2003: This was the first spacecraft designed as an exclusive mission to Jupiter. As an orbiter probe is orbited Jupiter  34 times in the span of seven years. Detail visuals and data were received about the moons. Galileo released a probe into the atmosphere which parachuted down to 150 km, recording 57 minutes of imagery, before disintegrating. This was major milestone and set a benchmark for further missions.

7.Cassini Huygens - 2000: Another flyby mission to Saturn, Cassini sent the best colour visual images of the planet. At a height of around 26000 km, the smallest recorded picture was of detail 60 km, across.

8.Horizones - 2007: En-route to pluto, this spacecraft stopped by Jupiter for gravity assist. During this period it recorded further details of the moons. Due to irretrievable memory error of the data handling computer, some recordings were lost. However, the system was rebooted in two days and New Horizons continued to stream readings.