Galileo’s Camera Goes Awry, Keeps Snapping for 5 Hours

Galileo’s camera shutter snapped uncontrollably for five hours Saturday after the spacecraft zipped around Venus, but officials said it should not endanger the $1.35-billion, eight-year mission to Jupiter.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shut off the television camera while they diagnosed the problem, which apparently involved faulty software that made Galileo’s computer send incorrect commands to the camera, mission director Neal Ausman said.

Galileo cruised around Venus at about 10 p.m. PST Friday, coming three to four miles closer to the planet than the planned point of closest approach of 10,028 miles above the surface, said mission science and design manager Bill O’Neil.

The camera appeared undamaged, but its shutter opened and closed twice per minute for a total of 468 times over five hours, Ausman said. As planned, only 16 pictures taken late Friday and early Saturday were stored on Galileo’s tape recorder, Ausman said.

The malfunction did not harm those pictures, and the 452 unwanted shutter snappings were “just like taking pictures with no film in the camera,” project manager Dick Spehalski said during a Saturday news conference.

However the problem threatened another five dozen photos the spacecraft was supposed to take during the coming week to make a time-lapse movie of Venus’ cloud and wind patterns, said project scientist Torrence Johnson.

Galileo was deployed from space shuttle Atlantis last Oct. 18 on a looping 2.4-billion mile, six-year route that requires Venus and Earth to be used as gravity slingshots to hurl the spacecraft to Jupiter.

Once there, the spacecraft will deploy a probe to study Jupiter’s atmosphere, then orbit the giant gas planet for at least two years.