This Week on Galileo - August 18-24, 1997
This week Galileo continues to travel on the longest orbit of its tour of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. 83 days long (from the Callisto-9 perijove to the Callisto-10 perijove), the orbit has allowed the spacecraft to penetrate deep into the region of Jupiter's magnetosphere known as the magnetotail. That's the region where Jupiter's magnetosphere has been swept back into a long tail by the solar wind. The final high-time-resolution recording of the magnetotail region is performed this week by the fields and particles instruments. The observation is taken when the spacecraft reaches a distance of 130 Jupiter Radii, or 9.3 million kilometers (5.8 million miles), from Jupiter on its way back to the massive planet.
Playback data continues to focus on this campaign of magnetotail observations. This week the fields and particles observations performed at 130 Jupiter Radii "outbound" from Jupiter is transmitted to Earth. On Sunday, playback is scheduled to start returning the observation taken at apojove (the farthest point from Jupiter for a given orbit) at a distance of 143 Jupiter Radii (10.2 million kilometers, 6.4 million miles). Once all the data from these observations are received on the ground, scientists will start the process of looking at the data in hopes of understanding how the magnetotail region contributes to the the inner magnetosphere.
Regular "3,000 mile" maintenance on the spacecraft's propulsion system and tape recorder is also scheduled to occur this week. Next week's playback schedule sees the return of observations of Callisto, Jupiter and the minor satellites taken during Galileo's previous flythrough of the Jupiter system.