Today on Galileo - September 3, 1996
The UVS instrument dominates the schedule for Galileo today, with the spacecraft 695 million km from Earth and 41 Jupiter radius distances away from the planet. For the first 10 hours of the day, UVS will be observing the dark side of Jupiter looking for aurora, scanning the entire planet for a full Jupiter rotation. Next, it will turn its attention to Europa, observing that satellite to determine surface properties. The remainder of the day is spent observing Jupiter again, first looking at hydrogen Lyman-alpha radiation at the mid-latitudes on the darkside of the planet, then comparing aurora on the day and night sides in the southern region, and finishing the day with a brightside map of Jupiter's global ultraviolet radiation. Around mid-day, the Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS ) and imaging camera will observe the latitudes of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy impact zone, as they rotate over the limb (edge) of Jupiter.