This Week On Galileo - August 10-16, 1998
Galileo spends this week returning to Earth science data captured during the spacecraft's flyby of Jupiter's moon Europa in late May. The data was left intact during Galileo's most recent passage through the heart of the Jupiter system, in mid-July, when a spacecraft anomaly halted all encounter activities. Science teams will take advantage of the existing transmission time to fill in gaps in existing data sets caused by previous transmission problems, or by the fact that there is typically not enough transmission time from one encounter to the next to return all of the valuable data stored on the tape recorder.
In this week's playback schedule, the near-infrared mapping spectrometer returns the final observation in a series of three designed to provide high spatial resolution information on the non-ice components of Europa's surface. The remainder of the week is spent returning observations of Io performed by the spacecraft camera. The first is designed to provide information on the size and age of sulfur grains on Io's surface. The next four were taken while Io was eclipsed from the sun by Jupiter. They are designed to allow scientists to study the changes in Io's surface temperature as the eclipse progresses.