This Week On Galileo
November 16-20, 1998
During these last few days before its next encounter, Galileo spends most of its time returning data acquired and stored on the spacecraft's onboard tape recorder during its previous encounter, back in September. The data will be overwritten by new data during the next encounter, which will begin later this week.
Playback is interrupted twice this week, first to allow the spacecraft to perform a final correction to its flight path as it approaches the heart of the Jupiter system, and then a second time to perform regular maintenance on its tape recorder. In addition, playback of data shares transmission time with real-time observations made by the dust detector instrument, which is collecting data on Jupiter's dust environment.
A variety of science data is returned this week, and like the last few weeks of playback, it is retrieved from a part of the tape that has been read through once before in this orbit. These data are entirely new, re-processed with different parameters, or will be used to fill gaps in previously returned data. Observations by the spacecraft camera and near-infrared mapping spectrometer comprise the bulk of the playback time and contain data describing the surface features of Europa at high, regional and global resolutions. The spacecraft camera also returns a single observation of Jupiter's rings.
Stay tuned for the return of Today on Galileo on Saturday, November 21, as Galileo starts the seventh encounter of the Galileo Europa Mission!