This Week On Galileo - May 25-29, 1998
Galileo spends this week preparing for its next passage through the heart of the Jupiter system. The encounter is scheduled to start this Saturday, May 30, and features a flyby of Jupiter's moon Europa at an altitude of 2516 kilometers (1564 miles).
Preparation for the encounter includes completion of processing and transmission to Earth of science information still stored on the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder. The data was acquired during Galileo's previous flyby of Europa in late March.
Data processing and transmission is interrupted once this week, on Thursday, when the spacecraft executes the final flight path correction prior to the close flyby of Europa.
Five observations remain on the data processing schedule. The first is a global color observation of Europa, performed by the spacecraft's camera. The image will provide information describing the global geology of Europa, specifically the origin, composition, and distribution of materials on the surface. The camera team also returns a global color observation of Ganymede. Similar to the Europa observation, the information returned will describe the radius, shape, color, and composition of Ganymede's surface. An observation of Io is also returned by the camera team. Acquired while Io was eclipsed from the sun by Jupiter, this type of data has proved to be the best way to discover and monitor lava temperatures and barely visible interactions between volcanic plumes, Io's atmosphere and Jupiter's magnetosphere.
The remaining two observations are returned by the near infrared mapping spectrometer team. One is the second of a set of three distant observations of Europa. The other is a global map of Callisto designed to provide more data describing the materials found on the surface.
Don't forget!!! Galileo's next encounter starts this Saturday, May 30, and with it comes the return of Today on Galileo. See ya Saturday....