GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. The NOAA and NASA-led GOES program has been operating since 1975. It has provided continuous imagery and data on atmospheric conditions as well as solar activity (space weather). This information is critical to military and civilian radio wave communication and navigation systems, electric power networks, Space Station astronauts and high-altitude aviators.
NOAA’s new 3rd generation GOES-R series will provide critical atmospheric, hydrologic, oceanic, climatic and solar science data. GOES-R will also improve NOAA’s direct services including GBR (GOES Re-Broadcast), S&R, DCS, and EMWIN, as well as improve space weather monitoring and alerts.
The GOES-R series includes the GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites currently in service as well as the GOES-T and GOES-U satellites scheduled for launch in 2022. NOAA oversees the GOES-R Series Program through an integrated NOAA-NASA office that acquires the satellites, manages their ground system contract and operates and distributes the satellites’ data to users worldwide. Lockheed Martin designs, builds and tests the satellites and their instrument payloads. L3Harris Technologies provides the GOES-T satellites’ main instrument payload, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI).
On October 17, GOES-T was packed up in a custom shipping container that protected its instruments and functioned as a miniature clean room during transport. The container was driven to Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, where it hitched a ride on a C-5 Galaxy aircraft to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is being unpacked in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations spacecraft processing facility in Titusville, ahead of its planned early 2022 launch from Cape Canaveral.
Upon reaching its orbital position 36,786 miles above Earth, GOES-T will be renamed GOES-18 and enter operational service as the GOES West satellite. It will monitor the U.S. West Coast, Alaska, Mexico, Central America and the Pacific Ocean. Like its siblings in the GOES-R family, GOES-18 will carry a suite of sophisticated Earth-sensing, lightning-detecting, and solar imaging sensors to help predict severe storms and hurricanes, as well as detect volcanic eruptions, fog and fires. The satellite will also have the ability to provide near real-time images of the entire surface of the Earth and its oceans.
GOES-18 will feature the ABI, the most advanced geostationary weather imaging satellite ever flown by NOAA. The ABI captures continuous images of the entire planet every five minutes – a dramatic improvement over the current GOES satellites’ scan cycle of 26 minutes. The ABI’s fast, frequent updates can aid National Weather Service (NWS) offices and centers, Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers, and airports in monitoring hazardous conditions like volcanic ash plumes that pose a threat to aviation safety. The ABI will also have a specialized imager to observe the Sun and the outer atmosphere at higher resolutions than can be seen with the existing GOES-U sensors. It will observe things that current GOES sensors cannot, such as the temperature of clouds and aerosols and the speed and direction of winds at high altitudes.