Galileo Status Report - April 22, 1996
PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
On the ground, the project team continued preparing, modifying and testing the flight software that will become part of the spacecraft for its orbital encounters that begin in late June.
This week will see more of the same.
The tape recorder test scheduled for last week was rescheduled to this week to allow for fault protection software changes and to provide more information from the test. A test of the spacecraft computer memories found them to be in good shape.
Engineers completed the third and final readout of part of the computer-stored probe science data last week, allowing scientists to verify measurements by comparing the three separate readouts of the data.
The experimenter teams have not yet fully analyzed the magnetometer and dust data collected since late March. However, an initial look indicates, as expected, very few particles detected because the dust detector was pointed away from the planet during this part of the orbit.
Today Galileo is 17 million kilometers (10.6 million miles) and 65 days away from Ganymede. The spacecraft is about 17.7 million kilometers from Jupiter and 741 million kilometers (460 million miles) from Earth. Signals take 41 minutes and 40 seconds to reach Earth from the spacecraft.