Today in Space History - A First Quiet Pass by Callisto 馃殌
Stardate 1870.6414 (NOVEMBER 4, 1996)
On this morning in 1996, NASA's Galileo spacecraft made its first close pass by Jupiter's moon Callisto. At 13:34 UTC it swept within 1,104 kilometers of a surface older and more heavily cratered than almost anything else yet seen up close in the solar system.
Voyager had only glimpsed this outermost Galilean moon from far away. Galileo's nearer look began a quieter kind of exploration, asking why a world so close to restless siblings had remained so still. The answers would come slowly, in data played back days later, from a moon that keeps its history in ice and stone.