When and in what order are the various data returned from the tape recorder?
Generally, in a first-in, first-out order, but spread over the several weeks of the orbital cruise. So data recorded in the first day or so of the encounter will be played back in the first week or so of cruise, and data recorded on the last day of the encounter will be played back in the last week or so of cruise. An interesting but also complicating characteristic of Galileos playback process is that the onboard data compression is not deterministic, so it is not possible to predict exactly when a given data set will be returned. Playback of data from the tape recorder is scheduled during the cruise phase of each orbit. The playback data shares the available telemetry capability with real-time science data after the higher priority engineering data has been placed into the downlink. The playback process is initiated, paused, resumed, or terminated through commands in the stored sequence.
