The Great Internet Blowout

Interest on the Internet for Galileo's Arrival at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, skyrocketed to levels never before seen at JPL. During the month of December 1995, the Galileo home page endured a staggering 4.7 million hits and over 102 gigabytes of information and images were downloaded from the home page. The peak of the Internet deluge occurred on December 9, when 336,000 accesses were recorded and 8 gigabytes were transferred. These numbers easily surpassed the records previously held by the popular Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 home page when the comet was impacting Jupiter in July 1994.

The Galileo home page was designed to bring people back to visit the home page again and again. This goal was achieved by the creation of a special Countdown to Jupiter home page, and the use of a number of innovative features. These included a daily Galileo Fact of the Day and up-to-minute updates of the Galileo spacecraft's current position. Also, during Jupiter Orbit Insertion, 3-D computer-rendered Jupiter approach images were updated every 5 minutes on the home page, and live Doppler data that showed the status of Galileo's main engine burn for orbit insertion were provided. All of these efforts helped in setting the record numbers for the home page. Recently, the Galileo home page and the Countdown to Jupiter home page were voted as two of the Top 10 NASA Sites of 1995.

A large part of this effort was performed in the Digital Image Animation Lab (DIAL) by Shigeru Suzuki and Frank Hartman as part of the Solar System Visualization Project, for which Eric De Jong is the Principal Investigator. Shigeru combined a model of the Galileo spacecraft with trajectory data supplied by Jennie Johannesen of the Navigation and Flight Mechanics Section. Frank rendered these images for presentation on the Countdown to Jupiter home page. Richard Weidner of the Imaging and Spectrometry Systems Technology Section provided the overhead, bird's-eye images of the entire Jupiter System.

The December records set by the Galileo home page are not expected to last very long. The next Internet frenzy at JPL is expected to occur on June 27, 1996, when Galileo encounters Ganymede. The Galileo Public Outreach team along with the Public Information Office are taking aggressive measures to increase JPL's World Wide Web capacity. We are prepared for another record-shattering event for Galileo during this June encounter.