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OFJ97 Field Journal from Laura Barnard - 2/5/97

This is a really active week for me. We have the Project Science Group (PSG) meeting and workshops going on. The Project Science Group is made up of international colleagues that decide what science we are going to do based on the resources and timing of events. They have these two to three day meeting twice a year so that everyone can be in the same room and work together. It also gives the science coordinators a chance to talk to their primary investigators about the science plans that they are creating. Naturally, there is always last minute stuff to put together for their presentations. Yesterday I worked on the graphics that they are presenting today, and tonight I need to put them on-line to our internal website for the science team. I attended the morning sessions (which were mostly about our upcoming ninth orbit, which will last about 90 days--far longer than most of our orbits) because they were talking about schedules and sequences that I will be working on in the near future.

For the rest of the day I worked on archiving our "uplink" planning materials. "Uplink" refers to what we send up to the spacecraft ("downlink" is what the spacecraft sends back to us). There is a lot of work that goes into figuring out what exactly will be sent up to Galileo, and we want to make sure that all of that work is preserved. Archiving is a large task that requires three or more types of software and different types of hardware. While the project is active we keep current copies of information and sequences that are commanded to the spacecraft on our UNIX computer system. When the project ends the files will be transferred to the NASA archives that are accessible by the public. While we were creating a new piece for the archive we noticed that the file sizes were not big enough. Sure enough the files were corrupted! I had to redo several sequences that were already archived and it will take me the rest of the week to correct it. Perhaps it will even take longer depending on the state of the damage. At least we found out *now* that information was missing--it would have been much harder to restore the lost portions years later.

 
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