KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is ready to carry NOAA’s next powerful GOES weather satellite into orbit, providing critical forecasting data to the meteorologists who issue weather warnings.
SpaceX’s triple-booster Falcon Heavy rocket will liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Launchpad 39A, sending NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite U (GOES-U) into orbit. The two-hour launch window opens at 5:16 p.m. ET on Tuesday, June 25.
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The new spacecraft will join NOAA’s small fleet of satellites orbiting more than 22,000 miles above Earth’s Equator and is the last in NOAA’s GOES-R series of satellites. The previous GOES launch happened with GOES-18 in 2022.
Crews transport NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-U) from the Astrotech Space Operations facility to the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida beginning on Friday, June 14, 2024.
(NASA/Ben Smegelsky)
What will GOES-U do in space?
Data from NOAA’s GOES satellites is intertwined with nearly every forecast Americans read daily.
While GOES-U won’t be operational in time for the 2024 hurricane season, its predecessor satellite is busy tracking the tropics, including the first named system of the season, Tropical Storm Alberto, in the Gulf of Mexico.
All GOES-R satellites have the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), which provides detailed imagery of hurricanes and other weather, helping the NWS issue severe weather alerts. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) can help forecasters with NOAA’s National Weather Service issue advanced warnings of severe thunderstorms or even tornadoes.
All of the GOES-R series spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin were designed to be functionally the same, but lessons learned from the previous satellites helped NOAA make some changes to GOES-U.
Technicians monitor movement and guide NOAA’s Geostationary Operation Environmental Satellite-U (GOES-U) as a crane hoists it on to a spacecraft dolly in a high bay at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky)
(NASA)
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The most significant change with GOES-U is the addition of the compact chronograph to improve space weather forecasting. This chronograph will continuously monitor the Sun‘s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, allowing NOAA forecasters to see where extreme space weather like solar flares and coronal mass ejections originate.
The timing of this new capability happens as the Sun approaches the most active period in its 11-year cycle, known as the solar maximum. In May, activity from sunspot regions produced the most extreme solar storm in 20 years, producing Aurora Borealis as far south as Florida.
Once in orbit, GOES-U will become GOES-19, acting as NOAA’s GOES-East satellite, watching over North and South America and the surrounding oceans. When fully operational in orbit, the satellite will produce between 1 and 3 terabytes of weather data daily.
NOAA is developing the sixth generation of GOES satellites, which will begin launching in the early 2030s.