To carry out comprehensive studies of plasma waves and radio emissions at Jupiter, the Galileo plasma wave instrument incorporates several features that provide improvements over the previous Voyager 1 and 2 measurements. These improvements include

• nearly simultaneous electric and magnetic field measurements to distinguish electrostatic waves from electromagnetic waves,
• direction finding measurements to determine source locations, and
• better frequency and time resolution to resolve fine structure in the plasma wave and radio emission spectrum.

The main instrument package and the electric
dipole antenna system were designed and constructed at the University
of Iowa, and the search coil magnetic antenna was provided by the
Centre de Recherches en Physique de l'Environnement Terrestre et
Planetaire (CRPE).

The Galileo Plasma Wave Receiver is described by

Gurnett, D. A., W. S. Kurth, R. R. Shaw, A. Roux, R. Gendrin, C. F. Kennel, F. L. Scarf, and S. D. Shawhan, The Galileo Plasma Wave Investigation, Space Sci. Rev., 60, 341-355, 1992.