This Week On Galileo - May 4-10, 1998
Galileo continues to process and transmit to Earth science information stored on the onboard tape recorder during the spacecraft's pass through the heart of the Jovian system at the end of March 1998. Science data processing is interrupted once this week as the spacecraft runs a performance test on the attitude control subystem to check on computer software changes made over the weekend. The software changes should make it possible for the attitude control computer to correct and use the anomalous data being produced by one of the spacecraft's two gyroscopes. The gyroscope has been behaving anomalously since December 1997.
This week's processing and transmission schedule includes observations that have already been processed and transmitted to Earth once. A normal part of operations on Galileo, this reprocessing and retransmission opportunity provides the chance to fill all data gaps caused by transmission problems. It also allows any particularly interesting information to be reprocessed under different processing conditions and retransmitted to Earth. Finally, it allows new parts of observations, that would not otherwise have been returned, to be processed and transmitted to Earth.
The solid-state imaging, or camera, team has three observations on this week's schedule. The first contains a region of Io that scientists hope to image at much higher resolution toward the end of the Galileo Europa Mission in October 1999. The image that is returned this week will provide a context for the October 1999 image. The two other images returned by the camera team contain different regions of Europa. The first looks at the the Mannann'an crater region and the second at a region of dark spots. The near infrared mapping spectrometer team returns the other two observations scheduled for this week. The first is the highest resolution map of Io that will be obtained during the Europa Campaign (December 1997 - April 1999) of the Galileo Europa Mission. It also contains the best view of the south pole of Io to date, although a better view is planned for observations in November 1999. The second observation captures Europa and a region of ice rifts.