Today on Galileo - February 17, 1997
Galileo's morning will be spent completing the majority of the tape recorder conditioning activity it started last night. These tape recorder conditioning activities are performed more or less twice per orbit, both immediately preceding an encounter (the current situation) and about half-way through each orbit, near apoapsis, the point in the orbit that the spacecraft is furthest away from Jupiter. Like any piece of equipment, the tape recorder requires a normal maintenance plan, and these conditioning activities are it. During the activity, the tape recorder is run from one end to the next which re-packs the tape around the reels. This re-packing keeps the tape in the right position on the reel and prevents possible damage to the other parts of the tape recorder. The conditioning activity was previously required only every 90 days. The current plan results in a conditioning activity about every 30 days. This more frequent schedule was put into place after the tape recorder anomaly in December 1995 and is believed to alleviate some of the conditions that could lead to a reoccurrence.
The first set of observations of this encounter are performed today during the latter half of the day. These observations are remote Io torus observations performed by the ultraviolet spectrometer in colaboration with the extreme ultraviolet spectrometer. If you recognize this observation, it is because a new set of remote Io torus observations is performed on almost every orbit as the spacecraft approaches the Jupiter system. These observations are part of a continued effort to map Io torus activity. Every observation opportunity occurs at different time and exposes Galileo to a different part of the torus . These observations continue into tomorrow.
Toward the end of the day, the Galileo team is scheduled to transmit commands that will instruct the spacecraft to execute the final orbit trim maneuver prior to the Europa encounter. This is the last opportunity the navigators have to fine tune the path the spacecraft will take as it flys through Jupiter's system. The orbit trim maneuver is scheduled to execute tomorrow.