NASA spent 14 years nursing the crippled Galileo probe through a jammed antenna and intense radiation, then deliberately crashed it into Jupiter in September 2003 — not because it failed, but because it found a probable ocean on Europa that a dead spacecraft might contaminate.
In September 2003, after fourteen years in space, NASA aimed the Galileo spacecraft straight into Jupiter and let the giant planet tear it apart. The probe was not broken. It had survived a main antenna that jammed shut on the way out, a radiation do... [11142 chars]