Galileo space probe in orbit around Jupiter when SL9 comet strike

[Archibald]

As usual - a lot is said in the title.

Background
The Galileo Jupiter orbiter was funded in 1977 to be launched in 1982 but only launched in 1990. It got into orbit around Jupiter in December 1995. That, and the main antenna jammed and the mission was severely hampered.
But...
In July 1994 comet Shoemaker Levy 9 (SL9) slammed into Jupiter. It had been discovered in March 1993 and had broken up in 21 large pieces.
As of July 1994 OTL Galileo was 150 million miles away from Jupiter and did some useful observations.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/gll.html
But imagine if it had seen the impacts from orbit, with a working main antenna. What a show it would have been.

Looks like they realized the comet would impact in May 1993.

By late May 1993 it appeared that the comet was likely to impact Jupiter in 1994.

So they would have had 14 months to re-position Galileo in the right orbit at the right moment to see the impacts.

According to space historians SL9 had a major impact in Hollywood and it seems that both (flawed) asteroid blockbusters of 1998 - Deep impact and Armaggedon were related to SL9.

The impacts were quite massive

The first impact occurred at 20:13 UTC on July 16, 1994, when fragment A of the nucleus entered Jupiter's southern hemisphere at a speed of about 60 km/s.[2] Instruments on Galileo detected a fireball that reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K, compared to the typical Jovian cloudtop temperature of about 130 K, before expanding and cooling rapidly to about 1500 K after 40 s. The plume from the fireball quickly reached a height of over 3,000 km.[17] A few minutes after the impact fireball was detected, Galileo measured renewed heating, probably due to ejected material falling back onto the planet. Earth-based observers detected the fireball rising over the limb of the planet shortly after the initial impact.[18]

Despite published predictions,[13] astronomers had not expected to see the fireballs from the impacts[19] and did not have any idea in advance how visible the other atmospheric effects of the impacts would be from Earth. Observers soon saw a huge dark spot after the first impact. The spot was visible even in very small telescopes, and was about 6,000 km (3,700 mi) (one Earth radius) across. This and subsequent dark spots were thought to have been caused by debris from the impacts, and were markedly asymmetric, forming crescent shapes in front of the direction of impact.[20]

Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[21] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[22]

 

[Archibald]

No taker, really ?

 

[Miss Teri]

Well, I'd imagine that we'd get a better scale of events. Given Jupiter's size, the marks that SL-9 made are admittedly somewhat small. If we got a closer look at it, it would show who large they actually were, and hammer in what an object like this could do to the Earth.

 

[Archibald]

Further research says that Galileo camera when imaging Jupiter could see details as small as 25 km per pixel. So the impacts should result in rather spectacular pictures - considering the sizes of both fireballs and dark spots.

 

[Halcyon Dayz]

Maybe governments would get a bit more serious about supporting programs for detecting and deflecting potential Earth impactors.

But than again, even the Chelyabinks Event didn't manage to do that.