Jupiter Probe Ends Mission After 14 Years

NASA plunged the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere today, bringing a fiery conclusion to a 14-year, $1.5 billion mission.

The unmanned spacecraft, traveling at nearly 108,000 miles per hour, was torn apart by the heat and friction of its fall through the clouds after it dived into the atmosphere at 2:57 p.m. Eastern time, as planned.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, hundreds of scientists, engineers and their families counted down the seconds before the spacecraft ended its 2.8 billion-mile journey to Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet.

Rosaly Lopes-Gautier, a scientist on the mission, called Galileo's descent ''a spectacular end to a spectacular mission.''

''Personally, I am a little sad,'' Ms. Lopes-Gautier added. ''I had the time of my life on Galileo and I'm a little sad to say goodbye to an old friend.''

Malfunctions had plagued the Galileo since its 1989 launching aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. Its main antenna failed to unfurl and some instruments were damaged by belts of radiation. But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration considered Galileo one of its most fruitful missions.

The spacecraft discovered the first moon of an asteroid, witnessed the impact of a comet into Jupiter and provided firm evidence of salty oceans on three of the planet's moons. Scientists consider one of the three, Europa, the most likely place in the solar system to harbor life.

Among the most stunning of the 14,000 images returned by Galileo were those of Jupiter's moon Io. Galileo caught some of the moon's more than 150 volcanoes spewing lava and plumes of dust and gas.

The last of Galileo's data arrived on Earth today after the spacecraft was destroyed, taking 52 minutes to cross half a billion miles of space.

''I just can't believe the spacecraft collected data all the way in,'' said a tearful Claudia Alexander, Galileo's seventh and last project manager.

NASA had first considered leaving Galileo in orbit after it depleted its fuel. Instead, the agency chose to crash the 3,000-pound craft to eliminate the possibility of hitting the watery moon Europa and contaminate it with any microbes aboard.

NASA intends to return to Jupiter in a decade with another unmanned spacecraft.