An artist's concept of NASA's Galileo spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. Photo: NASA/JPL

Galileo continues to return data acquired during the spacecraft's February 22 flyby of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io. This was the lowest-altitude flyby of Io ever, with the Galileo spacecraft passing only 198 kilometers (123 miles) above the surface. By comparison, during the recent STS-101 mission, the Space Shuttle flew 320 kilometers (200 miles) above the Earth's surface.

Data playback is interrupted three times this week. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) performs instrument calibrations. On Friday, the spacecraft performs a small turn to keep its radio antenna pointed towards Earth.

Three observations are returned this week by the Solid-State Imaging camera (SSI) and one is returned by NIMS. The first SSI observation contains part of a color mosaic of the Prometheus volcanic region. SSI then returns portions of a 12-frame mosaic covering the Camaxtli Patera hot spot and nearby regions to the west, including the Chaac Patera region. NIMS also returns data from the Camaxtli hot spot. The Chaac Patera coverage in the SSI mosaic will be combined with an earlier high-resolution observation to produce stereo views of this region. The third observation returned by SSI consists of color imaging of Io's Amirani volcanic region.