Galileo Europa Mission Status - August 10, 1998
MEDIA RELATIONS 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
The Galileo spacecraft is operating normally, processing and transmitting to Earth pictures and other science information stored on its onboard tape recorder. The playback of data was interrupted briefly yesterday for regular maintenance on the spacecraft's propulsion system. The spacecraft performed a scheduled flight path correction maneuver on July 31, to ensure that Galileo is aimed correctly as it heads toward its next Europa flyby on September 26.
This week's transmission of science data includes two pictures of Europa taken by the spacecraft's camera - one showing very rugged terrain east of the Tyre Macula region, and the other depicting a region of unexplored mottled, or blotchy, terrain. The near-infrared mapping spectrometer is returning several observations that help describe Europa's surface composition on a global and regional scale, and enable scientists to identify non-ice surface components. Information gathered also covers variations in temperature and composition across Jupiter's cloud belts and cloud zones.
This batch of data comes from Galileo's Europa flyby in late May. Most of the data from the spacecraft's Europa encounter in late July were lost because an anomaly put Galileo in a safing mode. Now that the situation has been corrected, scientists are playing back the remaining data from July. As an unexpected bonus, because the tape recorder has a reduced amount of July data to play back, it has more time to transmit additional data from the May flyby.
The Galileo Europa Mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.
Return to Project Galileo Homepage