Today, Galileo is scheduled to end its 14-year mission by plunging into Jupiter — deliberately. NASA believes that the massive subsurface ocean on Europa could harbor life, so pains must be taken to ensure there is no chance of contamination with Earthly bacteria.

Data will continue to arrive for about another hour — since that’s how long it takes for light to get from Jupiter’s neighborhood to us — but the craft is most likely breaking up as I type this at 2:00PM Central Time. Galileo showed us Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter in 1994; more tantalizingly, Galileo gave us evidence of the only other liquid water in the solar system (on Europa), which forces us to re-evaluate what a life-supporting planet might look like (heretofore, we assumed they’d need to look pretty much like Earth).

Have a drink to Galileo, the little-engine-that-could of space probes; it’s exceeded all reasonable expectations, particularly given its rocky beginnings.