Flashback to 29 years ago this week. Space Shuttle Atlantis deployed the Galileo spacecraft six hours, 30 minutes into the flight on Oct. 18, 1989. In the first photo, Galileo, mounted atop the inertial upper stage, is tilted to a 58-degree deployment position in Atlantis's payload bay with the Earth's limb appearing in the background. While its aim was to study Jupiter and its mysterious moons, which it did with much success, the Galileo mission also became notable for discoveries during its journey to the gas giant, by visiting two asteroids and providing the only direct observations of a comet colliding with a planet. The second photo shows the puzzling, and fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa in a reprocessed color view, made from images taken by Galileo in the late 1990s. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution. After discoveries, including evidence for the existence of a saltwater ...