This Week On Galileo - July 27 - August 2, 1998
Having recovered from last week's anomaly, Galileo is expected to return to normal operations this week. Last week's encounter was cut short when Galileo's main computer placed the spacecraft in safe mode after experiencing an erroneous power reset signal. An anomaly of this type has occured nine times in Galileo's past, but not since 1993.
The main computer is expected to start executing a revised cruise command sequence on Wednesday. Shortly after, a post-encounter test will be performed to keep track of changes to the performance of the spacecraft's anomalous gyroscope. On Friday, the spacecraft will execute commands to fire its thrusters and correct any errors to its orbital flight path.
Playback of data stored on the spacecraft's on-board tape recorder is expected to start toward the end of the week. Several observations were recorded successfully prior to last week's anomaly and are on this week's playback schedule.
The first observation on the schedule belongs to the near-infrared mapping spectrometer and looks for changes in Io's surface, in particular within the Prometheus volcano region. The photopolarimeter radiometer also returns an observation of Io designed to provide information on how rapidly temperatures change on Io's surface.
Observations of Jupiter's atmosphere containing data describing hot spots, white ovals and atmospheric temperature variations are also on this week's schedule. The hot spot information is contained in a single observations performed by the near-infrared mapping spectrometer. The white oval and temperature variation data are returned in one and two observations, respectively, all performed by the photopolarimeter radiometer.