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1994-08-20
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PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
Contact: James H. Wilson
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 12, 1994
NASA's Galileo spacecraft has begun a six-month process
of radioing to Earth data taken during the collisions of
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter in July.
From its vantage point in space en route to Jupiter,
Galileo had the only direct view of the collisions of comet
fragments on the dark side of the giant planet July 16-22.
Galileo stored observational data on its onboard tape
recorder and is transmitting them to Earth via its low-gain
antenna over several months.
Ground controllers initially instructed Galileo to send
back "jail-bar" image strips -- narrow slices of various
portions of data -- to help them search for the most promising
observations on the spacecraft's tape recorder. Preliminary
looks at "jail-bar" data recently sent to Earth of the impact
of the comet's fragment K led scientists to confirm detection
of an intense burst of light lasting about 40 seconds. These
data are from a special image frame that was deliberately
smeared during a time exposure to form a streak from Jupiter
and another from the impact flare, providing high resolution
in time and brightness. More data from the K event will be
sent to Earth in October.
Other data still stored onboard the spacecraft include
images of the fragment W impact; mission scientists do not
yet know whether the actual impact was captured on these
frames. A small portion of the fragment W data will be sent
to Earth in mid-August and late September; the rest is
scheduled to be received in January.
Data from the fragment G impact were taken with
Galileo's ultraviolet spectrometer, the infrared mapping
spectrometer and the photopolarimeter. These data will be
returned starting in late September and continuing through
December.
Galileo data primarily of interest to scientists and
amateur astronomers will be posted on an ongoing basis on
Internet via the World Wide Web system. This may be
accessed by the public from the home page of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., at the
address http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ under the "News" heading.
If comet impact images of more general interest are
received, they will be released through the newsrooms at
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C., and at JPL.
#####