Galileo Status Report - June 13, 1996
PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
More optical navigation images of Jupiter's moon Ganymede were received from the Galileo spacecraft this week. These will be used to fine-tune Galileo's trajectory for its upcoming 844-kilometer (524-mile) altitude flyby of Jupiter's largest moon on June 27.
The optical navigation images of Ganymede are not meant to be scientific images, but instead are highly edited onboard the spacecraft so that only the most basic data is returned to show Ganymede's location relative to the position of selected stars. Still, Galileo Project Scientist Dr. Torrence Johnson points out that the resolution of the Ganymede optical navigation images already exceeds that of the Hubble Space Telescope's resolution on the Jupiter satellites.
The second of three scheduled "orbit trim maneuvers" to refine Galileo's approach path to Ganymede were successfully executed by the spacecraft yesterday. Galileo project officials report that so far, the new flight software installed onboard the spacecraft three weeks ago is working flawlessly. The return of the Io torus data stored on Galileo's tape recorder started on schedule last week and continues as planned.
The Galileo Orbiter is operating normally in dual-spin mode.
Today, Galileo is 8.5 million kilometers (5.2 million miles) from Ganymede, and 639 million kilometers (397 million miles) from Earth. One-way communication time is about 37 minutes. Galileo's speed in orbit around Jupiter is 4.4 kilometers per second, about 9,971 miles per hour.