Galileo Status Report - March 8, 1996

PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011

GALILEO MISSION STATUS

March 8, 1996

The Galileo spacecraft is performing normally in orbit around Jupiter, and has resumed playing back the atmospheric probe data. The probe scientists are planning to update their preliminary conclusions later this month at a scientific meeting in Houston, TX, and are preparing them for journal publication.

Playback operations paused last week so the Galileo team could test operating strategies for using the tape recorder during the Ganymede encounter in June and the rest of the orbital science mission. Engineers are still studying the test results, which suggest possible modification to the operating strategies. Playback will be interrupted again next week for a planned major spacecraft maneuver, in which Galileo's Jupiter orbit will be reshaped, increasing the future close approach distance to Jupiter from 185,000 kilometers (115,000 miles) to 786,000 kilometers (488,000 miles) and setting up for the Ganymede encounter on June 27, 1996. Probe science playback will resume late in March.

Operations in the Galileo testbed are continuing at a fast pace, preparing the spacecraft's new operating system to be transmitted in May. This laboratory collection of spacecraft spare and engineering-model hardware, including scientific instruments, is an imitation spacecraft used to test new software, commands, and sequences before they are tried out on the actual spacecraft. Most of the new software, almost three times as long as the one presently operating the Galileo spacecraft, has been exercised in the testbed once since the testing began in January. A complete second round is scheduled before the software is ready to be installed in the spacecraft in May. Nine scientific instruments and the two main spacecraft computers will be reprogrammed to construct the new Galileo system in orbit around Jupiter, roughly 700 million kilometers (400 million miles) away.

Galileo is 19.3 million kilometers (12 million miles) from Jupiter, with an orbital speed near 450 meters per second or 1,000 mph. It is 18.5 million kilometers (11.5 million miles) from Ganymede. Radio signals take 47 minutes to reach Earth from the spacecraft.

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