Since its inception in 1975, NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) have been providing advanced imagery and data on atmospheric conditions as well as solar activity and space weather. The GOES-R Series is a collaborative NOAA and NASA program with NOAA managing the satellites while NASA oversees the acquisition of the spacecraft and instruments in addition to launch service through NASA’s Launch Services Program based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The GOES-S satellite is currently undergoing environmental testing to simulate the conditions the satellite will experience during the intense process of getting into orbit on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The satellite has completed both a reverberant acoustics test and a sine vibration test that expose the spacecraft to the sound and vibrations of the conditions it will face during the climb into Earth’s orbit.
GOES-S is the first satellite in NOAA’s GOES-R Series to feature the new Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). ABI has the ability to capture and save an entire Earth image every five minutes compared to 26 minutes on the older generation GOES satellites. In addition, ABI can detect a wide range of phenomena that current GOES instruments are not able to including clouds, water vapor, fog, dust, smoke, volcanic ash and winds.
Other key capabilities of the GOES-R Series are the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) and the Space Environment In-Situ Suite (SEISS). GLM will greatly improve storm hazard identification and increase warning lead time by providing night-and-day images of lightning. The SECESS instrument will monitor a wide range of physical and chemical properties including greenhouse gases, cloud water content, ozone, air temperature, sea surface temperature, carbon dioxide and the electromagnetic spectrum.
The GOES-R Series will also be the first to feature a Polar Orbiter (PO). A PO is an unmanned spacecraft designed to collect scientific data over long periods of time in Earth’s polar orbit. The PO will collect data on global winds, clouds and ocean surface temperatures in the northern hemisphere, including the Arctic and Antarctic. The GOES-R Series is expected to launch into geostationary orbit in 2024.
GOES-T will be renamed GOES-18 once it reaches geostationary orbit and undergoes a two-week period of on-orbit testing and checkout to ensure that all systems perform as expected before moving into an operational role. GOES-18 will assist GOES-17 in the GOES West role in late summer and again in early fall. Once GOES-18 is in an operational role, it will provide Western Hemisphere coverage for the next 10 years.