Destination: Jupiter

Issue 225 – June 2025 Non-Fiction by Andrew Liptak On the evening of January 7th, 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope to the sky and began viewing the planet Jupiter. He observed a trio of lights near the planet, and in the nights that followed, tracked their progress as they moved and vanished. Galileo realized that the objects were orbiting Jupiter, and they were behaving like Earth’s moon did around itself. He had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io, and in doing so, he forever changed how humanity would understand the nature of our solar system and our place in the universe. In the centuries since, writers have imagined how we might eventually visit and live around Jupiter, while new technologies have brought us closer than ever to its swirling atmosphere and the crowd of strange moons that orbit around it. After our sun formed around 4.5 billion years ago, the gas particles that were left over formed an accretion ... Read full article.