Cosimo II's twelve year reign was punctuated by his contented marriage with Maria Maddalena and his patronage of the revolutionary astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose ideas landed him in trouble with the Pope.

In the book Galileo, Courtier, Mario Biagioli argues that many of Galileo's actions, the most famous Italian scientist of the time, were dictated by the patronage system.

Under his patronage, Galileo got an indication to a professorship of mathematics at the University of Pisa, in 1589.

While the impacts took place on the side of Jupiter hidden from Earth, Galileo, then at a distance of 1. 6 AU from the planet, was able to see the impacts as they occurred.

Instruments on Galileo detected a fireball which 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.

Through such people as Nikola Tesla, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Thomas Edison, Ottó Bláthy, Ányos Jedlik, Sir Charles Parsons, Joseph Swan, George Westinghouse, Ernst Werner von Siemens, Alexander Graham Bell and Lord Kelvin, electricity was turned from a scientific curiosity into an essential tool for modern life, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution.

One of the aims of Galileo is to provide a high-precision positioning system upon which European nations can rely, independently from the Russian GLONASS, US GPS, and Chinese Compass systems, which can be disabled in times of war or conflict.

The first satellites bear the names of eleven-year-old Thijs from Belgium and nine-year-old Natalia from Bulgaria who are the first winners of the European Commission's Galileo children's drawing competition.

In 1999, the different concepts ( from Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom ) for Galileo were compared and reduced to one by a joint team of engineers from all four countries.

Although a decision was yet to be reached, on 13 July 2007 EU countries discussed cutting € 548m ($ 755m, £ 370m ) from the union's competitiveness budget for the following year and shifting some of that cash to other parts of the financing pot, a move that could meet part of the cost of the union's Galileo satellite navigation system.

The think tank Open Europe has estimated the total cost of Galileo from start to completion, and then running it over a 20 year period, at a € 22. 2 billion, which will be borne entirely by taxpayers.

The first two Galileo In-Orbit Validation satellites were launched by Soyuz ST-B flown from Guiana Space Centre on October 21, 2011.

However, due to security and technology-independence policy from European Commission, China was, in effect, dis-invited from Galileo and without a return of its monetary investment, a decision that was reinforced by China ’ s move to build its own global system, called Beidou / Compass.

Letter from Paul Wolfowitz to the Minister ( government ) | Ministers of the Member State of the European Union | EU states from December 2001 as part of the US-lobbying campaign against Galileo

One of the reasons given for developing Galileo as an independent system was that position information from GPS can be made significantly inaccurate by the deliberate application of universal Selective Availability ( SA ) by the US military ; this was enabled until 2000, and can be re-enabled at any time.

Despite suffering from antenna problems, Galileo conducted the first asteroid flyby near 951 Gaspra and discovered the first asteroid moon, Dactyl, around the asteroid 243 Ida.

Galileo furthermore discovered that Jupiter's faint ring system consists of dust from impacts on the four small inner moons.

The differing distances from Jupiter afforded by these orbits allowed Galileo to sample different parts of the planet's extensive magnetosphere.

One section of the spacecraft rotated at 3 rpm, keeping Galileo stable and holding six instruments that gathered data from many different directions, including the fields and particles instruments.

As the launch of Galileo neared, anti-nuclear groups, concerned over what they perceived as an unacceptable risk to the public's safety from Galileo's RTGs, sought a court injunction prohibiting Galileo's launch.

The camera system was designed to obtain images of Jupiter's satellites at resolutions from 20 to 1, 000 times better than Voyager's best, because Galileo flew closer to the planet and its inner moons, and because the more modern CCD sensor in Galileos camera was more sensitive and had a broader color detection band than the vidicons of Voyager.

The following information was taken directly from NASA's Galileo legacy site.

Theoretical reduction is the process by which one theory is absorbed into another ; for example, both Kepler's laws of the motion of the planets and Galileo ’ s theories of motion worked out for terrestrial objects are reducible to Newtonian theories of mechanics, because all the explanatory power of the former are contained within the latter.

Photonis USA operates the former Galileo Corporation Scientific Detector Products Group ( Sturbridge, Massachusetts ), which had been purchased by Burle Industries in 1999.

Late in 1613, Galileo's former student Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine monk, wrote to Galileo about the events at a recent dinner with the Grand Duke Cosimo II de ' Medici, he then wrote a letter to Justin the German Artist.

Natural philosophy was distinguished from the other precursor of modern science, natural history, in that the former involved reasoning and explanations about nature ( and after Galileo, quantitative reasoning ), whereas the latter was essentially qualitative and descriptive.

Galileo, old and broken, living under house arrest, is visited by one of his former pupils, Andrea.

Other bands who have featured former members of The Prisoners are Planet, The Buff Medways, The Prime Movers, Thee Mighty Caesars, The Stabilisers and The Galileo 7.

He has been active in the non profit sector, as a former board member of the Galileo Educational Network, trustee of the Alberta Heritage Community Foundation, Chair of the Human Resources Committee of Alberta Ballet and one of the founders of the Alberta Council of Technologies.

Of his other compositions, the most individual are those in which, deeply impressed by the problems of his day, he has sought to reconcile science and religion, especially the fine dialogue between John Milton and Galileo, where the former, impressed by Galileo's predictions of the intellectual consequences of scientific progress, resolves " to justify the ways of God to man.

Knowing this curious fact, Galileo encouraged his former pupil Evangelista Torricelli to investigate these supposed limitations.

In 1619 Benedetto Castelli ( 1576-1578 – 1643 ), a student of Galileo Galilei, published the book Della Misura dell ' Acque Correnti or " On the Measurement of Running Waters ", one of the foundations of modern hydrodynamics.

STS-34 Atlantis ( October 18 to October 23, 1989 ) was a 5-day mission during which the deployed the Galileo spacecraft, on its journey to explore Jupiter, operated the Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Instrument ( SSBUV ) to map atmospheric ozone and performed numerous secondary experiments involving radiation measurements, polymer morphology, lightning research, microgravity effects on plants and a student experiment on ice crystal growth in space.

During the mission the crew successfully deployed the Galileo spacecraft, starting its journey to explore Jupiter, operated the Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Instrument ( SSBUV ) to map atmospheric ozone, and performed numerous secondary experiments involving radiation measurements, polymer morphology, lightning research, microgravity effects on plants, and a student experiment on ice crystal growth in space.

Because of its strong science-related roots and continuing tradition, all of the student residence buildings have science-related themes and names: Gauss House, Galen House, Rutherford House, Harvey and Maxwell Houses, Leonardo House, Galileo House, and Descartes House.

During the mission crew members successfully deployed the Galileo spacecraft on its journey to explore Jupiter, operated the Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Instrument ( SSBUV ) to map atmospheric ozone, and performed numerous secondary experiments involving radiation measurements, polymer morphology, lightning research, microgravity effects on plants, and a student experiment on ice crystal growth in space.

A prospective student tells Galileo about a novel invention, the telescope (" a queer tube thing "), being sold in Amsterdam.

Bach was a 16-year-old student at Galileo High School when he decided to dedicate himself to the sport of badminton.

Apparently, the method that became known as Simpson's rule was well known and used earlier by Bonaventura Cavalieri ( a student of Galileo ) in 1639, later rediscovered by James Gregory ( who Simpson succeeded as Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews ) and was only attributed to Simpson.

He was a contemporary student of Galileo with Viviani.

* Vincenzio Viviani – Famous scholar, and student of Galileo.

The popular drama series, Galileo aired a special episode that included her in the cast where she played a student lab assistant.