The Galileo Spacecraft Slowly Closes In On Jupiter

A restful quiet settles back over the Galileo activity schedule this week as the spacecraft slowly closes in on Jupiter for its next flyby of Callisto later in May. On Saturday, the intrepid robot passes the invisible milepost that marks 125 Jupiter radii (8.9 million kilometers or 5.5 million miles) from the giant planet, a far cry from the 217 Jupiter radii (15.5 million kilometers or 9.6 million miles) reached at the farthest point in this orbit back on March 11, but with still a ways to go to reach the 7.3 Jupiter radii (522,000 kilometers or 324,000 miles) point which will mark the closest approach to Jupiter on May 23.

In addition to the usual housekeeping data (temperatures, voltages, and pressures) that keep the flight team engineers apprised of the health of the spacecraft and its various components on a daily basis, the bulk of the data received from Galileo this week will be that played back from the on-board tape recorder. These data were recorded last Sunday and Monday, and comprise a set of calibrations for the Solid State Imaging camera (SSI) and the Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS), two of the four movable remote sensing instruments on the spacecraft.