NOAA’s GOES-U arrives in Florida for processing ahead of launch

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite tv for pc U (GOES-U), the fourth and ultimate weather-observing and environmental monitoring satellite in NOAA’s GOES-R Sequence, is now in Florida. The satellite landed on Tuesday, Jan. 23, in a United States Air Power C-5M Tremendous Galaxy cargo airplane on the Launch and Touchdown Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Area Middle.

Knowledge from the environmental monitoring satellite constellation permits forecasters to foretell, observe, and monitor native climate occasions that have an effect on public security like thunderstorms, hurricanes, wildfires, and solar storms.

Groups spent a number of hours offloading GOES-U then transferring it to the Astrotech Area Operations facility in close by Titusville the place they’ll course of the spacecraft and carry out ultimate checkouts as a part of launch preparations.

“GOES is a particular circumstance as a result of it is a collection of missions,” stated Rex Engelhardt, GOES-U mission supervisor for NASA’s Launch Providers Program. “Information carries over from mission to mission, which makes for a extremely robust and a really skilled crew. To obtain and combine satellites like GOES-U onto industrial rockets, the launch companies crew understands the necessities of what the satellites are going to wish to achieve orbit, and that data is vital in bringing extra reliability to the mixing course of to assist guarantee success.”

Fueling will probably be one of many key steps to readying the spacecraft to function for 15 years in orbit. Technicians will add about 5,000 kilos of hypergolic propellants to GOES-U, then mate the spacecraft to a payload adapter and encapsulate it in a protecting payload fairing as a part of launch processing.

After testing and fueling are full, the encapsulated spacecraft will transfer to the SpaceX hangar at Launch Advanced 39A at NASA Kennedy. GOES-U is scheduled to launch no sooner than Tuesday, April 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

On board GOES-U are seven devices, together with a brand new Compact Coronagraph-1 (CCOR-1) instrument. As part of NOAA’s Area Climate Observe On mission, CCOR-1 will observe the sun’s outermost layer, known as the corona, for giant explosions of plasma that might produce geomagnetic solar storms. The CCOR-1 instrument will improve capabilities to offer advance warnings as much as 4 days forward of those storms that may trigger widespread harm to satellites, energy grids, and communication and navigation systems.

The GOES-R Sequence satellites are deliberate to function into the 2030s. Wanting ahead, NOAA is working with NASA to develop the subsequent technology of geostationary satellites, known as Geostationary Prolonged Observations, which is able to deliver new capabilities in help of U.S. climate, ocean, and local weather operations past the 2030s. NASA will handle the event of the geostationary satellites and launch them for NOAA.

“The GOES-R program demonstrates the large worth of NASA’s longstanding collaboration with NOAA,” stated Renee Falden, program govt within the Joint Company Satellite tv for pc Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re taking the very best qualities of that collaboration ahead into the GeoXO program, which is able to proceed NOAA’s key observations from geostationary orbit whereas producing new knowledge streams for a broad group of customers throughout the nation.”