Re: What satellites and/or telescopes are exploring the outer planets?

The Hubble Space Telescope takes occasional; pictures of the outer planets- 
in the past 7 years it has imaged all of them, showing changes in the 
clouds circling Neptune, and new volcanos ofn jupiter's moon IO.
 The principal investiagtions of the outer planets, however, have been 
carried out since Dec 1995 by the spacecraft Galileo, which was launched in 
1989, and has now been in orbit around Jupiter since Dec 1995, at which 
time it launched also an atmospheric probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, 
which operated for some 57 minutes before the atmospheric pressure 
destroyed it. The principal discoveries withthe probe were high winds of 
several hundred miles per hour, and a lower content of water vapour than 
expected.
 Most importantly, howerver, Galileo is on an extended series of flybys of 
the four galilaen satellites, from which the main news is that Europa, and 
now Callsto are VERY LIKELY endowed with liquid water oceans beneath a 
constantly changing surface layer of thin ice, tidally heated by Jupiter's 
massive pull.The result was a two years extended Galileo mission(GEM), now 
in progress. This could well be followed within 10 years, by a Europa 
orbiter, and, later in the new century, a lander; Europa has become the 
number one candidate for extraterrestrial life, to the presumed 
astonishment of Mars aficionados!
 The NASA/ESA spacecraft Cassini, is en route to Saturn with a lander, 
Huyghens, destined for the large satellite, Titan, whose cloudy atmosphere 
is thought to conceal an ocean of methane, bordered by waxy cliffs of 
methane and organic chemical cliffs!
 The Hubble Space telescope, meanwhile, has obtained the first clear images 
of Pluto and Charon as a double planet, and has seen lightning bolts in n 
Saturn's atmosphere of gigantic size.
 Also, the discovery of a new class of objects, the Centaur s in the Kuiper 
Belt, are being discovered in the lonely regions beyond Neptune and Pluto- 
our solar system has nearly doubled in size with the discovery, since 1992, 
of some 32 of these bodies, ranging from 100-200 kilometres in size.
 These are 8-9 light hours from Earth