This Week On Galileo - September 14-20, 1998
Galileo is quite busy this week as it starts wrapping up cruise activities in preparation for its next flyby of Europa on September 26. This week's main activities include the ongoing acquistion of real-time fields and particles data, and processing and transmission to Earth of science data stored on the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder. These activities are interrupted several times this week to perform standard engineering activities.
On Tuesday, the spacecraft will execute a turn to keep its antenna pointed toward Earth, and will also perform regular maintenance on its propulsion system. On Wednesday, another routine performance test of the spacecraft's attitude control gyroscopes is scheduled.
This week's playback schedule contains three observations taken by the spacecraft camera and three observations taken by the near infrared mapping spectrometer. As with previous weeks, the data was acquired during Galileo's May encounter with Jupiter and its icy moon Europa.
The near infrared mapping spectrometer returns two observations of a four observation set designed to look at Europa's surface with special emphasis on identifying the non-ice components of the surface. The other spectrometer observation is the last one of a three-observation set designed to search for composition and temperature variations across Jupiter's belts and clouds.
Two of the spacecraft camera observations provide additional information on how temperatures change on Io's surface as it passes through an eclipse of the Sun. The eclipse images have also proven to be the best way to discover and monitor lava temperatures, and almost invisible interactions between Io's volcanos, Io's atmosphere and Jupiter's magnetosphere. The final camera observation is designed to monitor the volcanic activity of the Kanehekili plume. This plume was discovered to be active during Galileo's primary mission in May 1997.