NASA plans to crash its $1.5 billion Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter next weekend to make sure it doesn't accidentally contaminate the planet's ice-covered moon Europa with bacteria from Earth. After Galileo's orbit carries it behind Jupiter at 3:49 p.m. EDT Sunday, the aging probe will plunge into the planet's stormy atmosphere at a speed of nearly 108,000 mph. Its suicide dive comes at the end of its 35th orbit of the planet -- far longer than the 11 orbits the spacecraft originally was planned to complete. The heat generated as it streaks through the atmosphere will vaporize the nearly 3,000-pound Galileo and the untold millions of microbial stowaways lurking since its 1989 launch. The crash will ensure Galileo doesn't hit Europa and spill bacteria onto the ice that caps its enormous oceans. Europa, a planet-sized moon, is widely believed to have the most promising habitat for extraterrestrial life within the solar system. Were Earth bugs to gain a toehold on Europa, perhaps in pools of water warmed by radioactive plutonium the spacecraft uses to generate electricity, they could compromise future attempts to probe the moon for indigenous life. "It seems like a good place where, potentially, you can have life and it also seems like a place where Earth life would find it a nice place to live. So why hit it?" said John Rummel, planetary protection officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA typically scrubs its spacecraft clean of microbes to prevent what it calls the "forward contamination" of other places in the solar system. That wasn't done with Galileo, which NASA originally intended to leave in orbit around Jupiter.
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