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This Week On Galileo - May 18-24, 1998


                            THIS WEEK ON GALILEO
                              May 18-24, 1998

With just about two weeks remaining before its next close encounter with
Jupiter's moon Europa, Galileo spends this week continuing to process and
transmit to Earth science data gathered during its previous encounter in
late March. Data processing is interrupted once this week, on Wednesday, to
turn the spacecraft to keep the radio antenna pointed toward Earth, and to
perform regular maintenance on the spacecraft's propulsion system.

Only two observations are on the processing and transmission schedule this
week. Both were performed by the spacecraft's camera, or solid state imaging
subsystem, and contain science information describing Europa. The first is a
high-resolution picture of the Tyre Macula crater region. This region
contains a circular feature about 140 kilometers (87 miles) in diameter
(about the size of the island of Hawaii) and is thought to be the site where
an asteriod or comet hit Europa's ice crust. The second observation contains
a region that shows a transition from bright plains to pull-apart wedges.
These features suggest that the surface crust has been separated and filled
with material from below the surface.

Last week, flight team engineers sucessfully identified and corrected a
minor error in an update to the attitude control computer's onboard software
that had been performed on Sunday, May 3. The original software update had
not been performing as expected. Testing performed after this latest update
has shown that the software is now performing as designed and the attitude
control computer should be able to correct and use the output from the
gyroscope that has been behaving anomalously since December 1997.

For more information on the Galileo spacecraft and its mission to Jupiter,
please visit the Galileo home page:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/