Galileo Mission Status - October 10, 1997
PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Galileo has adjusted its playback schedule after some pauses last week when the Deep Space Network antenna time was needed for Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor. These pauses led to the loss of about 10 megabits of playback time from the recent Callisto encounter. Some of the Callisto data have been transmitted this week, but most of the time has been spent playing back observations of Jupiter and Io.
Observations have included Jupiter's north pole auroral and equatorial regions made by the near infrared mapping spectrometer, global observations of Europa and Io performed by the solid state imaging camera and regional observations of Jupiter and its auroras from the photopolarimeter radiometer.
The solid state imaging camera has also returned an observation of the area where Io's flux tube intersects Jupiter's atmosphere and creates a glow. The flux tube is a stream of charged particles believed to move back and forth between Io and Jupiter along the planet's magnetic field lines. Additional Io playback includes near infrared mapping spectrometer data on chemical and volcanic changes, and a solid state camera image of Io while it was eclipsed from the Sun by Jupiter.
The fields and particles instruments have returned high time resolution data captured during the 60 minutes in which Galileo flew closest to Callisto.
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