QUESTION:
I am wondering if anything out of the ordinary happened with the spacecraft.

ANSWER from Steven Tyler on February 12, 1996:
Plenty of unusual things have happened to Galileo.  The most striking
unusual thing that happened to the spacecraft is that our big high
gain antenna didn't open!  That left us with only the low gain
antenna.  This meant that our bit rate was reduced.

You can appreciate what a severe blow cutting the bit rate can be by
looking at your modem (I'm guessing that you have one or you wouldn't
be on the Net).  Nowadays, most people are getting modems that deliver
28 thousand bits per second or 14 thousand bits per second.  A few of
us still have old modems that supply 2400 bits per second or even just
300 bits per second.  Well, the antenna determines our bit rate.  When
we are as far away as Jupiter, the high gain antenna would give us
about the same bit rate as a good modem: over ten thousand bits per
second.  The low gain antenna gives us only 8 bits per second much of
the time.  So we get our information a thousand times more slowly than
we'd like.

On your computer, you'll see that downloading a few key numbers, or
even a short message takes a small number of bits.  But a picture, or
worse, a movie, will take a huge number of bits.  With the lower bit
rate, we'll get back far fewer pictures, and we won't get movies at
all.  At Europa, this will be very annoying, because only by taking
lots of pictures can we tell if there are tides from an underground
ocean there.

Losing our big antenna was out of the ordinary.

Galileo has had other unusual things happen.  When it was launched, we
didn't know about the Shoemaker-Levy comet.  But when the comet
crashed into Jupiter, Galileo just happened to be close enough to
record the fireball that the comet fragments made on impact.  The
impact was just barely on the backside of Jupiter from us, so we
couldn't get a good look at the impact from Earth.

There have been a number of minor problems with the spacecraft.  One
that is of particular interest is that the tape recorder has a
problem.  Sometimes, the tape sticks in one postion.  We have freed
the tape twice so far.  Without a tape recorder to store pictures on,
we would have to play each picture back right after we took it (or
maybe each pair of pictures).  With our bit rate so low, that wouldn't
permit very many pictures.  But for now, the tape recorder works.  The
problems with the recorder did prevent us from getting any close-up
pictures of Io, however.

Thanks for your interest in our spacecraft.  It's a lot of fun to work
on, and I wish I had more time to tell you more about it.