QUESTION:
How does it feel for you, the Galileo science team, when a mission is
abandoned after a number of years, but the spacecraft still sends back
useful information, such as the recent cancellation of the Pioneer 10
project?

ANSWER from Glenn Orton on April 19, 1997:
I'll have to admit that the end of any mission has a sad feeling for
anyone involved.   Three things provide some consolation.  (1) The
original Pioneer-10 mission was only supposed to last for a couple of
years, so we got a GREAT deal more information from it than we
expected. (2) Some current missions, such as Galileo, ARE being
extended past their original termination dates - even though there are
increasing failures in several of the systems and instruments. (3)
Finally, we are generally SWAMPED with data on which we need to work!
I'm still hard at work on Galileo Probe and on Ganymede-1 encounter
data from 10-16 months ago, and we've only just started to touch the
surface of the data from subsequent orbits.