This Week On Galileo - August 3-9, 1998
Galileo is back in its normal operating mode, processing and transmitting to Earth science data stored on its on-board tape recorder. Playback is interrupted once this week to perform regular maintenance on the spacecraft's propulsion system
Typically, the amount of data stored on the tape recorder during a given encounter is more than can be transmitted to Earth in the subsequent cruise period. Selective editing and compression of the stored data allows the science teams to return the most important parts of the recorded observations, but much valuable data is left unreturned. Due to the recent encounter anomaly, the majority of the science data recorded during Galileo's previous encounter, in late May, was not overwritten by new data. This situation will provide the science teams with an opportunity to fill all data gaps caused by previous transmission problems or loss of Deep Space Network antennas to other missions, or to obtain more complete information sets by selecting entirely new data.
On this week's playback schedule the camera returns a couple of images of Europa. The first contains an unusually rugged terrain east of the Tyre Macula region. The second looks at a region of unexplored mottled, or blotchy, terrain. The remaining observations are returned by the near-infrared mapping spectrometer. Two observations contain information describing the composition of the surface of Europa on global and regional scales. Two others will provide data that will be useful in identifying non-ice components of the surface. The last three observations will provide information on the differences in temperature and composition found across Jupiter's cloud belts and cloud zones.