Tech and Science Bound for Low Earth Orbit - NASA (.gov)

In April 1991, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft was a year and a half into its journey to Jupiter when it ran the commands to open its main antenna. Minutes later, telemetry showed that the motors had stalled. The 4.8-meter, umbrella-shaped dish had only partly unfolded, and it never fully deployed. Without that antenna, Galileo’s best remaining link to Earth was a small low-gain antenna that could carry only a tiny fraction of the planned data. What followed was one of the more inventive rescues in spaceflight: engineers rewrote the spacecraft’s software to edit and compress its data, rebuilt how Earth listened for it, and replanned the science around a far smaller data budget.