Nov 13, 2002 2 min read

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) – NASA scientists struggled to get a balky tape recorder to work Tuesday so they could retrieve some of the final data gathered by the aging Galileo spacecraft. The data, gathered last week, must be retrieved by Jan. 15 when spacecraft operations will cease.

After that, Galileo will complete its 35th and last orbit of Jupiter before slamming into the planet in September 2003 and ending its $1.4 billion mission. The spacecraft was launched in 1989 and arrived at Jupiter in 1995.

Galileo entered standby mode on Nov. 5, after flying past Jupiter’s moon Amalthea and just before it made its closest approach to the planet itself. It was measuring the magnetic environment near Jupiter, as well as the planet’s gossamer ring of dust, the last data it was to collect.

In standby or safe mode, a spacecraft ceases nonessential activities until orders are received from mission controllers. Since then, flight controllers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have restored Galileo to its normal state, and planned to dispatch a final batch of commands late Tuesday.

However, there is no indication from the probe that its tape recorder can move, which would preclude its replaying data from the flyby for transmission to Earth.

“We don’t have definitive, diagnostic data to distinguish between what could be wrong with it,” said Eilene Theilig, the Galileo project manager at JPL.

The balky recorder has been stuck in the past, but scientists believe it is experiencing a different type of problem this time.

“Galileo always throws something new and different,” Theilig said.

The probe’s destruction was planned to keep it from hitting the moon Europa, and possibly contaminating it with microbes from Earth. Europa’s frozen surface is believed to cover a salty ocean that could harbor extraterrestrial life.

On Earth, scientists continue to extract information from real-time data transmitted by Galileo that would allow them to estimate the mass of Amalthea, one of Jupiter’s 39 known moons.

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On the Net: http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/