On September 21, 2003 NASA deliberately directed its amazing, still-functioning Galileo spacecraft to make one final, 108,000 mph suicidal plunge into Jupiter’s vast atmosphere. Thus ended the incredibly successful eight-year unmanned NASA Galileo mission … which had returned against all odds an array of phenomenal new information on Jupiter and its “mini-solar system of moons” … in a literal, most fitting “blaze of glory.”

The intent of this unfortunate decision was to protect Europa, one of those Jovian moons. Galileo’s repeated Europa observations (below) over the course of its highly successful eight years have all-but-confirmed an extraordinary model, first proposed and published by this author in 1980, and reproduced here: that, beneath its several-miles-thick ice cover, Europa still harbours a liquid water ocean … an ocean potentially teeming with 4.5 billion year-old alien life!

NASA’s decision to finally terminate Galileo via a fiery plunge into Jupiter, was designed in 2002 to prevent any possible biological contamination of this remarkable environment from a future random collision with the spacecraft, once its fuel was exhausted. The recommendation, from the National Research Council’s Space Science Studies Board’s “Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration” to NASA re the Galileo “problem,” noted “This [procedure] is necessary to safeguard the scientific integrity of future studies of Europa's biological potential ….”

When NASA announced its “Galileo into Jupiter” option, among those to publish immediate, serious objections (and later to repeat them on “Coast to Coast AM”) was an engineer named Jacco van der Worp. Van der Worp claimed that, plunging into Jupiter’s deep and increasingly dense atmosphere, the on-board Galileo electrical power supply – a set of 144 plutonium-238 fuel pellets, arrayed in two large canister devices called “RTGs” (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators – see image and schematic, below) – would ultimately “implode”; that the plutonium Galileo carried would ultimately collapse in upon itself under the enormous pressures of Jupiter’s overwhelming atmosphere.

Triggering a runaway nuclear explosion…...