But when such a comparison was carried out using the Galileo probe, which is currently orbiting Jupiter, the two answers matched.

ECONOMIST: A space oddity

More recently Galileo, a probe now investigating Jupiter, has been the beneficiary of the long-distance fixers' art.

ECONOMIST: The long arm of the celestial repairman

In 1995, NASA scientists received the first data from the space probe Galileo -- a message beamed over 2.3 billion miles (3.7 billion km).

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In December 1995 the space probe Galileo showed that Europa probably has an ocean beneath its icy crust, with tidal heating providing a likely energy source.

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But by using compression software and getting Galileo to record data on its tape-recorder for later transmission, almost all of the probe's objectives have still been achieved.

ECONOMIST: The long arm of the celestial repairman

Galileo's most remarkable discoveries, however, and the ones that dictated that it would eventually follow the probe's fiery fate, were made not about Jupiter itself, but (appropriately) about the four large Jovian moons discovered by Galileo Galilei, the 17th-century astronomer after whom the craft was named.

ECONOMIST: Galileo and Jupiter