Like a good scientist, Galileo raised many more questions than it could answer, but the spacecraft’s demise Sunday in the Jupiter neighborhood it spent years exploring ended a remarkable mission and provided NASA with a new and intriguing understanding of the Jovian planet and its moons. NASA receives intense and deserved scrutiny for its failures. It ought to be recognized when it can claim “Mission accomplished.”

Launched in 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, Galileo began exploring Jupiter in 1995. Sunday, after traveling 2.8 billion miles and low on propellant, it was sent on its way to crash into the planet to ensure that it did not strike the moon Europa and possibly contaminate it. During eight years of exploration it provided beautiful images of lava flowing on the Jupiter moon Io, explored the magnetic field on the moon Ganymede and identified, according to NASA, the global structure of Jupiter. Its findings of atmospheric elements suggest Jupiter evolved after the planet formed out of “solar nebula.” It found that Jupiter has thunderstorms, highly turbulent winds and powerful lightning strikes. Ammonia was found in the lower regions of its atmosphere.

But the most remarkable discovery, or at least most remarkable to nonscientists and the reason for the care used to avoid striking Europa, was the evidence Galileo accumulated to suggest that the moon Europa had liquid oceans under its icy surface. “Everywhere on Earth where we’ve looked and there’s water, we find life, whether it’s miles down under the surface of the ocean or up in the atmosphere,” Paul Fieseler, a NASA systems engineer, told Newsday. “So possibly the same rules apply for Europa.”

That possibility of life, and all the complications life brings, practically demands that NASA return for more exploration. And with exploration, more questions, more understanding and, quite possibly, more signs of life.