High-Gain Antenna. Galileo's original design called for a deployable antenna to unfurl, providing approximately 34dB of gain at X-band (10GHz) for a 134kbps downlink of science and priority engineering data. When it did not unfurl following the Earth fly-by in 1992, the spacecraft was reconfigured to utilize the S-band (2.8GHz) omnidirectional antenna for downlink at much lower data rates, from 8-16 bps through Jupiter Orbit Insertion. This 8dB gain low-gain antenna (LGA) was originally supposed to "trickle" down low-rate engineering data, and to be utilized in case a fault resulted in the spacecraft "safing" and shifting to a Sun-pointed attitude, resulting in loss of signal from the HGA. Enhancements to the Deep Space Network and reprogramming the flight computers on Galileo will increase the telemetry bit rate to 8-160 bps which will be used starting in the spring of 1996. New Telecommunications Strategy

High Gain Antenna. This is the dish antenna on the NEAR spacecraft.