A Go board, the flat, oblong gameboard on which Go is played. The word is an abbreviation of the Japanese words for “board” and “go,” which also mean ‘to move’. Go is a game of strategy and planning, as well as chance and luck. It is one of the world’s oldest board games, and it has a rich and varied history.

In go, the objective is to gain control of the opponent’s territory by surrounding and enclosing their stones. The first player to reach this state wins the game. There are many ways to do this, including the use of ‘komi’, or fixed points that determine how much territory each player can win. Go has a large number of moves, far more than chess (over five times as many in fact). For this reason, an exhaustive computer program for the game would be extremely expensive to develop. Most computer programs only calculate the best move on each turn, rather than every possible move.

The GOES satellite series is designed to monitor the Earth’s weather from geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the ground. Each spacecraft is equipped with a variety of sensors and is operated by NOAA’s SOCC (Satellite Operations Control Center) at NOAA/NESDIS in Suitland, Maryland. The GOES system is designed to provide improved operational services, enhance atmospheric science research and support NOAA’s numerical weather prediction models.

The satellites in the GOES series fly the SEM instrument package, provided by NOAA/SEC (Space Environment Center). This includes the Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) and the Space Environment Monitoring Sounder (SEM). The SXI instrument provides near real-time imaging of the Sun’s explosive atmosphere, allowing NOAA forecasters to provide timely warnings when the sun’s activity could harm astronauts and satellites in space as well as on Earth.

GOES Sounder provides a full disk scanning capability over the Earth’s surface at 10 minutes intervals. This is a key feature for detecting areas of turbulence and for monitoring the movement of clouds and other phenomena such as volcanic eruptions.

The GOES system also includes self-timed and random reporting Data Collection Platforms (DCPs). These simple platforms are configured to report their sensor measurements on a regular schedule or at the signal strength threshold of the GOES satellite. This allows the DCP to provide a more consistent data stream to the satellite, reducing the frequency of its communication to the GOES. The GOES system also includes EPS and HEPAD, which detect high energy protons and alpha particles using the phenomenon of Cerenkov radiation. This enables the GOES to detect very high energy events such as solar flares and to continuously monitor galactic cosmic rays.