This Week On Galileo - September 21-24, 1998
The next few days are very busy for Galileo as the spacecraft rapidly approaches its next close encounter with Jupiter's icy moon Europa, which will take place Saturday evening, September 26. In addition to important navigation and engineering activities, Galileo spends the week completing playback of science data stored on the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder. Encounter computer commands are scheduled to start executing late Thursday night (Pacific Time). These commands are transmitted to the spacecraft on Wednesday.
The final flight path correction prior to the Europa flyby will be performed on Tuesday, if necessary. On Thursday, just prior to the start of the encounter, the spacecraft will perform regular maintenance on its onboard tape recorder.
This final week of playback contains four observations. Two were obtained by the spacecraft camera. The first contains an image of Io while eclipsed from the sun by Jupiter, and the second provides a regional map of Europa. The other two observations for this week were obtained by the near-infrared mapping spectrometer. Both look at Io and provide more information describing volcanic activity on this fiery moon.
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