by CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida – A next-generation weather satellite has left its home planet behind.
After concerns that the weather would not cooperate, a great opportunity opened today (June 25) to launch GOES-U, the fourth and final member of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). GOES-R series Earth observation craft.
GOES-U caught a ride on SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket from NASA’s Launch Complex 39A Kennedy Space Center (KSC) here on the Space Coast, stepping off the pad today at 5:26 pm EDT (2126 GMT). The crowd erupted into thunderous applause as the brawny rocket hurtled into space on its 10th ever ascent.
“I could feel the adrenaline when it started to launch. It was unbelievable,” said Dakota Smith, a satellite and communications analyst at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), after watching his first launch ever. “GOES has been a big part of my career and my passion and my hobby and to see a satellite go up and know that we’re going to continue to get great images and I’m going to continue to work on the This mission, It means a lot to me.
The Falcon Heavy consists of three modified and strapped together first stages of a working SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The second stage, and the payload, is located on top of the central booster.
The heavy lifter’s two side boosters returned to Earth today as planned, heading towards Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to KSC, about eight minutes after the lift. This homecoming created a completely different experience for spectators than the launch of GOES-U’s three sister satellites, all soaring into space on United Launch Alliance. Atlas V rocket, which is not reusable.
The core booster did not return safely on today’s mission; the launch required him to burn so much of his fuel that he did not have enough for a controlled return to Earth.
Related: How the GOES U satellite will change Earth and space weather forecasts forever
The Falcon Heavy’s upper stage launched GOES-U geostationary orbit22,236 miles (35,785 kilometers) above World, about 4.5 hours after planned launch. At that point, the satellite was renamed GOES-19.
GOES-19 and its instruments will be sent by the mission team through an extended series of check-outs, after which the satellite will replace GOES-16, which was launched in November 2016 and is currently in the GOES East position in the satellite network. (Yes, GOES naming conventions are confusing.)
“After launch, there is a period of time when the orbit is stabilized and then we turn on all the sensors; we give that first light and we expect it in about two months,” Rick Spinrad, NOAA Administrator, told Space .com soon. before today’s launch.
“Then, we go through the process of exchanging with GOES East which is currently operating, and that will probably happen around April of 2025,” he said. “At that point, we will be fully operational, and we will be new satellite effectively going into storage orbit to be used as a backup.”
GOES-19 will monitor much of the Western Hemisphere with its five science instruments. It will also play a major role in monitoring and study space weather using a new compact chronograph instrument (CCOR-1), developed by the Naval Research Laboratory.
“Basically, what it does is, it takes an image of it the sun as if it were eclipsed every 30 minutes and gives us an image and advance warning if something is headed our way,” said Jim Spann, senior scientist in NOAA’s Office of Space Weather Operations, Space.com.
“This is an operationally new product,” he said. “We have flown a coronagraph since the mid-90s on ESA [European Space Agency]/The NASA SOHO mission, which was a science mission, has done a great job. But it is much longer than the years, so in order to create a long-term sustainable operational capability, we are flying with this compact coronagraph.”
Today’s launch is part of a five-year partnership between NOAA and NASA involving the operation of more than 60 satellites that provide data to aid in weather forecasting, climate studies and storm forecast.
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“We’ve gotten more use out of it, and in ways that we didn’t expect when we first thought about what the GOES-R series could be,” said Mike Brennan, director of NOAA National Hurricane Center, by Space.com.
“For example, we found the one-minute meso sector imagery very useful for diagnosing the genesis of tropical depressions or tropical storms,” he said. “We found the high-resolution images useful for monitoring rapid intensification events and other aspects of tropical cyclone structural change. Just by having more frequent images, we see things we didn’t see before when that we only had an image every 30 or 60 minutes during a storm.
The operational lifetime of the current GOES-R series will extend into the 2030s. His successor will be the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite system.the first member of which is due to launch in 2032.
“We’re so excited about GeoXO. We get to leverage everything we learned on GOES, and we’re going to put all of that into the GeoXO series and make it an even better spacecraft,” said Jagdeep Shergill, GOES-R series program manager at Lockheed Martin with Space.com.
Note to the editor: This story was updated at 12:45 a.m. ET on June 26 with news of a successful satellite deployment.
