GALILEO TRANSMITS IMAGES OF JUPITER MOON.

Byline: Associated Press

The Galileo spacecraft is transmitting information recorded last week when it came within 430 miles of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, where a hidden ocean may lie, NASA officials said.

But the best Europa close-ups yet won't be available until early January.

``Everything is going normally on the spacecraft, and the return of the high-resolution images of Europa started on schedule,'' Bill O'Neil, Galileo project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, reported Thursday.

Galileo began radioing stored data Wednesday.

He said imaging data will be collected and processed over coming weeks. The new Europa images are expected to be completed in early January and released soon afterward.

During the flyby, which occurred at 10:53 p.m. PST on Dec. 18, Galileo passed 200 times closer to Europa than the Voyager spacecraft did during its 1979 Europa encounter.

Europa especially intrigues planetary scientists because it appears to have two of the ingredients essential for life: water and an internal heat source. Last month, planetary scientists and oceanographers met in San Juan Capistrano to conjure up plans for how they would go about searching out potential life in the ocean they suspect lies beneath Europa's frozen crust.

Galileo collected information on Europa and other Jovian moons through last Sunday. It recorded readings on temperature, magnetic fields, the search for electrical phenomena called auroras and studies of the charged particles surrounding Europa.

Galileo will pass even closer to the intriguing moon on Feb. 19, when it will come within 364 miles. It will return again on Nov. 6, when it will pass within 699 miles of the crackled surface.

Galileo, launched in 1989 aboard a space shuttle, began a two-year orbital tour of Jupiter and its four major moons in December 1995. It has revealed Io to be the most volcanically active body in the solar system, detected a dearth of craters on the ancient face of frozen Callisto, discovered icy quakes and a core within planet-sized Ganymede, and found regions where Europa's icy crust apparently pulls apart and then fills in with flowing material.