This Week on Galileo - June 2-8, 1997
This week commands for an orbit trim maneuver are transmitted to the spacecraft. This maneuver, executed late Monday night, will correct the spacecraft's orbit so that it arrives along the planned path for its next encounter with the Jupiter system later this month. A few hours prior to the maneuver, by chance, as it is required about once every 23 days, regular maintenance is performed on the spacecraft's propulsion system.
Playback continues in the days surrounding the orbit trim maneuver. This week's playback is comprised primarily of data taken of features in Jupiter's atmosphere. The selected feature for the past encounter was the south pole boundary region. Eleven observations of this region performed by NIMS (Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer) and two observations performed by PPR (Photopolarimeter Radiometer) are returned this week. Four NIMS observations of a secondary feature, a temperate region near 50 degrees south latitude, are also returned this week. Regional observations of Jupiter's atmosphere are also on the week's playback schedule. Strips running from pole to pole, known as North-South strip observations, are returned from both PPR and NIMS. Hot spot observations from PPR and NIMS and a regional map taken by PPR that includes the Great Red Spot are also returned this week.
PPR continues to return observations from its polarimetry map campaign. This week's contribution includes six observations of Io, four observations of Europa and two observations of Callisto. SSI's (Solid State Imaging camera) return of a full-disk observation of Metis, one of the minor moons, completes the first round of playback through the data stored on the tape recorder from the last encounter.
The second pass through the previous encounter's data starts on Friday. Recall that this second opportunity to get at the data is used by the science community and playback planners to return new data that they initially thought they might not have enough time to return, fill in small gaps in already played-back data caused by transmission and reception problems, and to re-play parts of observations that have been identified as being interesting enough for a second look.
The second pass starts with a return to observations of Callisto. The second pass data on this week's schedule includes a global observation performed by NIMS, a south pole maps by PPR, NIMS and SSI, a Voyager gap-fill observation by SSI, and a NIMS observation of the cratered region of Adlinda.