Galileo Project manager Eilene Theilig shared this November 13th update on the spacecraft's mission status: The Galileo spacecraft had a rough ride through the Jupiter system last week (November 5th) as it flew past the small moon Amalthea and swung around the giant planet. This was the closest the spacecraft has gotten to Jupiter. As a result of the radiation environment, the spacecraft suffered several problems and ended up canceling science data collection about 16 minutes after passing Amalthea and placing itself in a standby mode. The Galileo engineers worked through the week and, as of Sunday, November 10th, the spacecraft was back to normal. One remaining problem is with the tape recorder which contains all of the fields and particles observations acquired at high data rates. This data set is a continuous sampling of the magnetosphere from the orbit of Io to just inside Amalthea's orbit. The team is

working hard to get the recorder operating so that we an playback this valuable data set. Unfortunately, we have to face the real possibility that the recorder is permanently damaged and we may not ever get the data back. We did successfully acquire part of the field and particles experiment in real-time.