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Development

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft with an octagonal prism bus and managed the Galileo mission for NASA. West Germany ' s Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm supplied the propulsion module. NASA's Ames Research Center managed the cone-shaped atmospheric probe, which was built by Hughes Aircraft Company. At launch, the orbiter and probe together had a mass of 2,562 kg (5,648 lb) and stood 6.15 m (20.2 ft) tall. Spacecraft are normally stabilized either by spinning around a fixed axis or by maintaining a fixed orientation with reference the Sun and a star; Galileo did both. One section of the spacecraft rotated at 3 revolutions per minute, keeping Galileo stable and holding six instruments that gathered data from many different directions, including the fields and particles instruments. Back on the ground, the mission operations team used software containing 650,000 lines of code in the orbit sequence design process; 1,615,000 lines in the telemetry interpretation; and 550,000 lines of code in navigation. All of the spacecraft components and spare parts received a minimum of 2,000 hours of testing. The spacecraft was expected to last for at least five years—long enough to reach Jupiter and perform its mission.