Technical tricks will let the Galileo spaceship successfully explore Jupiter even if the main antenna remains stuck, NASA said as it displayed a crisp snapshot of an asteroid.
"We're going to get one heck of a return for that tax money out there," said Torrence Johnson, the $1.4 billion mission's chief scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Galileo should be able to complete 70 percent of its Jupiter studies, although it might return only 2,000 to 4,000 pictures instead of the planned 50,000, Johnson said Thursday at a news conference.
The main loss will be thousands of pictures that would have been used to make movies of Jupiter's swirling weather patterns. Most pictures of Jupiter's moons will be obtained as planned, but they won't cover the entire lunar surfaces, Johnson said.
The spacecraft is likely to return only 1 percent of the computerized data that were expected.
But that should contain most of the desired information because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will make its receiving antennas on Earth more sensitive and "compress" data to eliminate unneeded information, such as pictures of empty space.
The 16-foot-wide, umbrella-shaped antenna failed to open last year, and repeated repair efforts have failed. Engineers believe three of the antenna's 18 ribs are stuck to a central tower.
If the main antenna remains stuck, Galileo will have to transmit data slowly using its two smaller antennas.
Engineers initially feared that the problem would cripple the mission, but now realize "we're going to be in very good shape," said William J. O'Neil, project manager.
Even with the small antennas, Johnson said Galileo will achieve 80 percent of its atmospheric research goals, 60 percent of its magnetic field studies and 70 of its research on Jupiter's moons.