Today on Galileo - April 1, 1997
Early this morning, Galileo finishes its execution of the final orbit trim maneuver before its encounter with Ganymede later this week. The remainder of the day is spent performing remote observations of the Io torus with the UVS (Ultraviolet Spectrometer) and EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer) instruments and a magnetosphere radiation observation by the PWS (Plasma Wave) instrument.
The remote Io torus observations are part of an ongoing set of observations that provide information required to map and characterize the energy distribution within the Io torus. The PWS observation is gathering information on the radiation that is believed to exist in the lobes of Jupiter's magnetosphere. The lobes are the regions of the magnetosphere that are between the magnetopause (the boundary between normal space and the magnetosphere) and the plasma sheet. This region is believed to contain much lower concentrations of plasma, and very little is known about how the plasma in this region behaves.