GOES-U nears launch with a brand new solar sensor

SAN FRANCISCO – The first distinction between the geostationary climate satellite tv for pc scheduled to launch June 25 from NASA’s Kennedy House Middle in Florida and its predecessors is its solar-viewing instrument.

Not like the opposite three satellites within the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite tv for pc-R sequence, GOES-U, set to takeoff at 5:16 pm Japanese Time June 25 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, carries a Compact Coronagraph constructed by the Naval Analysis Laboratory.

“The Compact Coronagraph, or CCOR, is a brand new instrument for GOES-U that can detect the white gentle of the higher photo voltaic corona, the outer layer of the solar, and ship imagery again to Earth to be used at our House Climate Prediction Middle inside half-hour,” Jordan Gerth, Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Nationwide Climate Service meteorologist, mentioned throughout a Could 29 press briefing. “This can be a huge enchancment in comparison with our present system which may take as much as eight hours to get knowledge.”

Meteorologists at present receive coronal imagery from the Massive Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph on the European House Company-NASA Photo voltaic and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), launched in 1995. As a result of few floor stations are capable of talk with the SOHO, “we will’t get the information in as quick as we would like,” mentioned Elsayed Talaat, director of NOAA’s Workplace of House Climate Observations.

General, SOHO is “an getting older satellite tv for pc that’s going to be power-limited in a yr or two,” Talaat mentioned. “So we’re in a race to get this coronagraph up.”

CCOR will probably be mounted on a GOES-U platform going through the solar, alongside Lockheed Martin’s Photo voltaic Ultraviolet Imager, and the Excessive Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors from the College of Colorado, Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and House Physics.

Working collectively, the devices “will see and sense the photo voltaic wind, photo voltaic flares and coronal mass ejections that may ship billions of tons of extremely magnetized materials hurtling in direction of Earth at a number of million miles an hour,” Talaat mentioned. “This materials, as we noticed within the latest storms, causes geomagnetic results, which may set off widespread harm to electrical energy grids that energy communities in addition to impression satellites, communications and navigation programs.”

Classes Discovered

In different respects, GOES-U is very like the opposite GOES-R satellites. All are the dimensions of small faculty buses. They usually have the identical major instrument: the Superior Baseline Imager, constructed by L3Harris Applied sciences, which gathers imagery of Earth’s climate, oceans and surroundings in 16 spectral bands.

The GOES-R satellites are also outfitted with Lockheed Martin Geostationary Lighting Mappers, magnetometers and the House Atmosphere In-Situ Suite from Assurance Expertise Corp., which incorporates sensors to observe protons, electrons and heavy ion fluxes within the magnetosphere.

“The plan from the start has been for the 4 GOES-R sequence spacecraft to be nearly the identical mannequin,” mentioned John Deily, GOES-R flight mission supervisor, NASA Goddard House Flight Middle.

Even so, NASA included “all of the upgrades and classes realized from the event and operation of the primary three spacecraft,” Deily mentioned.

When it reaches geostationary orbit, GOES-U will probably be renamed GOES-19. After on-orbit checkout, GOES-19 will exchange GOES-16 within the GOES-East orbital slot at 75 levels west. If all goes as deliberate, meteorologists can have entry to GOES-19 imagery and knowledge by spring.

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