Mounted on a 196-foot-tall United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES-T, was wheeled over to Space Launch Complex 41. If everything goes as planned, GOES-T will begin its final journey at 4:38 p.m. the opening of a two-hour launch window.
ULA will live stream the launch on its website and social media channels starting at 4 p.m.
The forecast fromSpace Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron has an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions for launch. If weather does cause a delay, Wednesday evening is the next window of opportunity.
The GOES-T launch is a group effort by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United Launch Alliance, L3Harris and Lockheed Martin. A successful launch will mark the second ULA Atlas launch of the year, and 92nd overall for that company’s workhorse rocket.
The collaboration’s 11,500-pound, school-bus-sized satellite is the third in the GOES-R series of four advanced weather satellites, costing a total of $11.7 billion. GOES-T will take its position over the western United States allowing meteorologists and researchers to better observe Pacific hurricanes, atmospheric rivers, severe lightning, mudslides, floods and wildfires. Once its in position, GOES-T will take on the GOES-18 moniker, replacing its predecessor GOES-17.
The retiring satellite experienced degradation in its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) — a tool allowing scientists to view the Earth in different kinds of spectral bands. GOES-17’s degradation was due to a thermal disruption blocking a flow of coolant. Despite technical issues, GOES-17 is still providing scientists with 90% of potential data, only missing some infrared channels during certain times of the year and certain times of night, said Dan Lindsey, a GOES-R program scientist with the NOAA.
“GOES-18 will have a 100% functioning ABI. We won’t have any outages,” he said.
After GOES-T takes its place, GOES-17 will move into “orbit storage,” roughly above Colorado, between GOES west and GOES east, Lindsey said.
“That way if we have future problems with 16 or 18, GOES-17 is sitting there and ready to back up any outages that may happen,” he said.
On Friday, Lindsey and a panel of scientists held a press conference discussing GOES-18’s technological advancements allowing it to deliver 60 times more imagery than the previous generation. Among its many tools, the ABI has16 different kinds of spectral bands including two visible channels, four near-infrared channels, and 10 infrared channels. The previous generation of GOES could only view five different bands.
The new ABI is so powerful, one ABI image would require 60 4K televisions to show the picture in full resolution, said Daniel Gall, the ABI chief systems engineer at L3Harris Technologies. GOES-18 will be capturing storm and climate data every 30 seconds and putting it into the hands of meteorologists, 30 seconds after it’s taken.
“These data, along with the five other instruments on board the spacecraft, are sent out to users, also — provided by L3Harris — combined with the ground systems three-and-a-half terabytes’ worth of data are processed every day,” Gall said.
While GOES-18 will be stationed over western America and studying weather phenomena in the Pacific, the U.S. East Coast will still benefit, as most weather starts in the west and makes its way east, said James Yoe, chief administrator of the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation.
“The exception being African hurricanes,” Yoe said. “We measure conditions over the west today and those are the weather systems that will impact downstream (eastern) weather several days or a week later.”
In addition to the new ABI, GOES-T’s utility belt of tools include a geostationary lightning mapper, a particle flux sensor, a solar irradiance monitor and a magnetometer. The latter three tools would give scientists an extra eye in monitoring solar storms that could potentially harm Earth’s power grids.
GOES-T will spend the majority of the year getting ready to become operational. In October, NOAA scientists will take operational reins. It should start sending images by 2023, by which point it would be known as GOES-18. From there, scientists hope the satellite will provide data for agencies and models all over the world until the 2030s when a new generation is planned to take over.
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