scope:

Abstract:

A scan platform anomaly occurred shortly before Galileo's encounter with the asteroid Ida. Because the Galileo architecture did not provide for revolving, short-term storage of downlink data, ground control lacked insight into the cause of the incident.

Missions should continuously buffer at least a small amount of high-rate telemetry as it is being downlinked at a lower rate. Storage of high-rate data for the period immediately preceding and following a fault would assist mission analysts in diagnosis of the problem.