GOES-S - Atlas V 541 (AV-079) - Canaveral SLC-41 - 02.03.2018

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Jonathan McDowell‏Подлинная учетная запись @planet4589 3 ч.3 часа назад

GOES-S, now separated into transfer orbit, will maneuver to geostationary orbit over the coming days. It will be renamed GOES 17 once operational

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Atlas V GOES-S Launch Highlights

United Launch Alliance

Опубликовано: 1 мар. 2018 г.

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https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2018-03-01-Lockheed-Martin-Supports-Critical-Weather-Forecasting-Mission-With-Second-Next-Generation-Weather-Satellite

Media - Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin Supports Critical Weather Forecasting Mission With Second Next-Generation Weather Satellite

NOAA Continues to Advance Current Weather Satellite Constellation with the Successful Launch of GOES-S Satellite

CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla., March 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A satellite launched today will augment the GOES-16 weather satellite and provide broad coverage with powerful new weather monitoring technology for meteorologists to provide life and property-saving forecasts. Today, at 5:02 p.m. ET, NOAA's GOES-S weather satellite, built by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), was launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket and has successfully established communications.

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NOAA's next weather satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R Series, GOES-S, which will be renamed GOES-17 upon reaching geostationary orbit, will be positioned to boost forecast accuracy for the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii. With data from GOES-17, and the already operational GOES-16, the two satellites will observe most of the Western Hemisphere. These satellites will continue to deliver dazzling weather data that has captivated forecasters such as first-of-its-kind lightning mapping and high-definition views of weather systems. This sophisticated information will support short-term weather forecasts and severe storm warnings, maritime forecasts, and space weather predictions. Additionally, the technology will improve hurricane tracking and intensity forecasts, increase thunderstorm and tornado warning lead time and improve wildfire detection.

"GOES-S increases the coverage of our nation and will contribute to the quality and timeliness of weather data – but it is also more than that." said Tim Gasparrini, GOES-R vice president and program manager at Lockheed Martin Space. "As is evident with the performance of GOES-16 on orbit, we are gaining insight into our weather like never before. The extended application of this data is expected to have a large impact on industries like shipping and logistics, aviation, transportation and more."

Lockheed Martin designed, built and tested the satellite and is responsible for spacecraft launch processing. In addition to all four GOES-R Series satellites (R, S, T and U), Lockheed Martin also designed and built the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instruments that will fly aboard each spacecraft.

NOAA funds, manages and plans to operate the GOES-R Series satellites. NASA oversees the acquisition and development of the GOES-R Series spacecraft, instruments and launch vehicle for NOAA. NASA's Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center is responsible for launch management. The program is co-located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/02/weather-satellite-for-the-west-coast-launched-from-cape-canaveral/

Weather satellite for the West Coast launched fr om Cape Canaveral
March 2, 2018 | Stephen Clark


Credit: United Launch Alliance

A weather satellite set to bring new storm tracking capabilities to the western United States and the Pacific Ocean rode into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket Thursday.

Kicking off a 15-year service life, the 11,488-pound (5,211-kilogram) robotic weather observer lifted off at 5:02 p.m. EST (2202 GMT) Thursday fr om Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 launch pad.

Mounted on top of a 197-foot-tall (60-meter) Atlas 5 launcher, NOAA's GOES-S weather satellite vaulted away fr om Cape Canaveral after a trouble-free countdown, keeping a launch date assigned nearly one year ago.

Sporting four Aerojet Rocketdyne strap-on solid rocket motors and a Russian-made RD-180 main engine, the Atlas 5 rocket climbed through a mostly sunny sky, darting through puffy clouds and leaving a twisting exhaust plume in its wake as the launcher departed to the east from Florida's Space Coast on 2.1 million pounds of thrust.

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The Atlas 5 surpassed the speed of sound in 35 seconds, and its four solid rocket boosters burned out and jettisoned at T+plus 1 minute, 50 seconds. About a minute-and-a-half later, the Atlas 5's nose cone, built by Ruag Space in Switzerland, jettisoned as the rocket soared above the aerodynamic friction from the dense lower layers of the atmosphere.

Burning almost a ton of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant per second, the RD-180 engine continued firing until nearly four-and-a-half minutes into the mission. Moments later, the booster stage dropped away to fall into the Atlantic Ocean, and an RL10C-1 upper stage engine ignited for the first of three burns on Thursday's flight.

The first firing ended around 12 minutes after liftoff to reach a preliminary low-altitude parking orbit, and the second RL10 burn ignited 10 minutes later to propel the GOES-S weather satellite into an elliptical transfer orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above Earth.

The battery-powered Centaur upper stage coasted three hours, rising in altitude until it reached a predetermined point thousands of miles over Australia, wh ere the RL10 engine reignited for a 95-second maneuver to nudge the GOES-S satellite closer to the equator.

An engineer monitoring telemetry from the rocket announced separation of the GOES-S satellite from the Centaur stage at 8:34 p.m. EST (0134 GMT), prompting applause inside the Atlas Space Operations Center at Cape Canaveral.

Video from an on-board camera replayed through a Guam ground station showed the GOES-S spacecraft, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, deploying from the Centaur stage.


(video 0:35)

Ground controllers confirmed the GOES-S spacecraft completed a partial extension of its solar arrays, as planned, shortly after release from the Atlas 5 rocket in an on-target orbit.

Data transmitted from the Atlas 5 indicated it placed GOES-S in an orbit between 5,095 miles (8,200 kilometers) and 21,928 miles (35,289 kilometers) in altitude, tilted at an angle of 9.5 degrees to the equator.

Those parameters amounted to a near-perfect bullseye.

"This was smooth," said Tim Dunn, NASA's launch director for the GOES-S mission. "They don't all come this way, but when they do, we truly appreciate them."

NASA provides launch and spacecraft expertise for NOAA's weather satellites.

Thursday's mission marked the 76th successful flight by an Atlas 5 rocket in the same number of tries, and the 147th success in a row for an Atlas-Centaur launcher since 1993.

"Thank you to our partners at NASA and NOAA for the outstanding teamwork, as we delivered this next-generation satellite to orbit," said Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of government and commercial programs. "We are proud to serve as the ultimate launch provider, continuing our dedication to 100 percent mission success."

But the fiery launch from Florida's Space Coast was just the beginning for GOES-S, which will spend the coming months moving into its final orbital perch, completing checkouts, and finally entering service later this year.

The satellite will join a sister observatory, GOES-16, launched in November 2016 and now providing real-time weather imagery over the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the eastern United States.

The twin spacecraft, the first two in NOAA's GOES-R series, each carry six instruments to monitor weather on Earth and in space, including an imager that can see more detail and collect pictures more rapidly than NOAA's past weather satellites.


NOAA operates two satellites in the GOES-West and GOES-East positions in geostationary orbit, plus spares. Credit: NOAA

GOES-S's on-board engine, built by the Japanese company IHI, will fire six times over the next 10 days, beginning Saturday, to nudge the satellite toward its geostationary orbit destination. A final maneuver 14 days after launch will stop the satellite's orbital drift over the Americas, setting up for a series of tests at a position at 90 degrees west longitude.

The power-generating solar panel will be fully extended around 12 days after launch, once GOES-S reaches its planned circular orbit nearly 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers) over the equator.

At that altitude, GOES-S's speed will keep pace with Earth's rotation, allowing it to hover over the same place on the planet day and night.

The satellite's X-band antenna will be deployed 18 days after launch, and an auxiliary S-band and L-band antenna wing will be extended 19 days after liftoff, according to Tim Gasparrini, GOES-R program manager at Lockheed Martin.

The boom holding GOES-S's magnetometer instrument will be deployed 20 days after launch, and then controllers will begin configuring the satellite's weather instruments for observations, including a month of outgassing to ensure the sensors are free of contaminants that might have been carried from Earth.

Tim Walsh, acting director of the GOES-R program at NOAA, said the new weather satellite will be ready to move to its final operating post at 137 degrees west longitude around six months after launch to begin tracking storms over the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and Latin America.

Once in geostationary orbit, NOAA will rename GOES-S as GOES-17.

"GOES-S, our latest and greatest, will complete the implementation of high-resolution coverage of the entire country, delivering better observations faster than ever before. GOES-S will become GOES-West and keep an eye on the weather patterns that impact the West," said Joe Pica, director of the National Weather Service's Office of Observations.

The GOES satellites, launched in series since 1975, are the "backbone of weather and climate forecasts," said Stephen Volz, director of NOAA's satellite and information services.

Imagery from the GOES satellites are featured in weather broadcasts and used as a primary forecasting tool by meteorologists across the Western Hemisphere, helping track tropical cyclones and tornado-spawning severe storms, plus monitoring for snow and ice cover, wildfires and fog that threaten transportation and property.

The newest family of GOES satellites, beginning with GOES-16 launched in 2016, offer a "quantum leap" in capability over NOAA's earlier generations of geostationary weather observatories, Volz said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.


A side-by-side comparison of images captured by GOES-16, a clone of GOES-S already in orbit, and a previous-generation GOES weather satellite. Credit: NOAA

The Advanced Baseline Imager on the latest four GOES satellites can return scans of an entire hemisphere once every 15 minutes, half the time needed by one of NOAA's earlier geostationary spacecraft. The imager can scan the continental United States once every 5 minutes.

The new ABI-equipped satellites can return pictures of hotspots like hurricanes at a cadence of once every 30 seconds, an improvement from the five-minute rapid scans available today.

"These satellites are giving us the ability to look at storms as often as every 30 seconds, allowing forecasters to see storms as they're developing instead of as they've already happened," Walsh said.

The imager, built by Harris Corp. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, can simultaneously scan the broader hemisphere in its field-of-view and capture close-up views of individual storm systems, giving forecasters refreshed views of hurricanes and tornado outbreaks.

The ABI can see in 16 visible and infrared channels, yielding deeper insights into moisture levels and cloud types unavailable with previous weather satellite images. Earlier GOES satellites had imagers sensitive to five different parts of the light spectrum.

The upgrade allows meteorologists to distinguish between snow, fog, clouds, volcanic ash, and other particles suspended in the atmosphere.

"GOES-16, even beyond its spectacular imagery, is already proving to be a game changer with much more refined, higher quality data for faster and more accurate weather forecasts and warnings," said Ajay Mehta, acting deputy assistant administrator for systems at NOAA's satellite and information service. "This means more lives are saved and better environment intelligence for state and local officials, who, for example, may need to make decisions about when to call for evacuations ahead of life-threatening wildfires."


Artist's concept of the GOES-S satellite in orbit. Credit: Lockheed Martin

"The ABI, one of the instruments, is able to detect small fires before they get too large, sometimes before people even dial 911," said Dan Lindsey, senior science advisor to the GOES-R program at NOAA.

"National Weather Service forecasters will use GOES-S to monitor atmospheric, river and estimate rainfall associated with the most intense storms," Pica said. "It wil help us track plumes from volcanic eruptions and see more clearly the total evolution of Pacific Ocean tropical storms."

Before officials declared it operational, GOES-16 recorded detailed views of powerful hurricanes last year churning in the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

GOES-16 tracked movements of Hurricane Harvey as it approached the Texas coast and dropped inundating rainfall over Houston, then watched as Hurricane Irma struck Florida and Hurricane Maria made a devastating landfall in Puerto Rico.

NOAA made GOES-16 operational in the so-called "GOES-East" position at the equator over 75 degrees west longitude in December.

The new GOES imager is sensitive enough to chart fog building and dissipating near airports, helping air traffic controllers route airplanes around bad visibility.

"The new satellite will augment observations over the Pacific Ocean and around mountain ranges wh ere radar coverage is limited or blocked," Pica said. "Marine forecasts will improve with GOES-S high-resolution imagery as we see features in the atmosphere and ocean that previous instruments did not allow. Combining these images with rapid updates every 30 seconds will help us predict storm systems more accurately and in real time."

GOES-S will also get a better look at ice flows and other seasonal weather patterns in Alaska, officials said, allowing forecasters there to use more GOES satellite data in their daily outlooks. In the past, forecasters in Alaska could not count on the highest-quality imagery from GOES satellites because of their oblique viewing angle from equatorial orbit.

Like its predecessor already in space, GOES-S carries a detector to locate in-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning strikes day or night, giving weather forecasters an inventory of the location, frequency and intensity of lightning activity that could help warn the public of severe storms.

The lightning detector on GOES-16 has pinpointed 13 billion lightning strikes since its launch less than 16 months ago.

Other instruments on GOES-S will look at the sun and chart solar radiation output and solar flares, which affect conditions in Earth's upper atmosphere and generate geomagnetic storms, leading to possible disruptions in communications, navigation and electrical infrastructure.

An ultraviolet solar camera fitted to a telescope on GOES-S will take full disk images of the sun.

A magnetometer and space environment sensor will measure particles and electric fields in space, providing data on charging conditions that could damage other satellites.

GOES-S also hosts a transponder to receive faint distress beacons anywhere on Earth that is visible to the spacecraft. The signals will be relayed to search-and-rescue forces on the ground.

With two modernized satellites in geostationary orbit, NOAA officials said forecasters from New Zealand to West Africa, and from Canada to Patagonia, will have a critical new tool at their fingertips. A pair of Japanese Himawari satellite launched in 2014 and 2016 carry the same type of advanced imager as the new GOES craft, extending the improved coverage into the Asia-Pacific region.

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Two more satellites in the GOES-R program — GOES-T and GOES-U — are in assembly at Lockheed Martin's factory in Denver for launches in 2020 and 2024.

NOAA has budgeted $11 billion for the program, a figure that includes the four spacecraft, weather instruments, launch services and ground systems.

Gasparrini said the build-up of the GOES-T satellite is well underway in Denver, and pieces of the GOES-U satellite are arriving. Officials intend to finish both spacecraft as soon as possible to keep the assembly line going without disruption, and GOES-U will likely go into storage for a few years before its launch.

Launchers for the GOES-T and GOES-U missions have not been sel ected by NASA, but ULA and SpaceX are expected to compete for the contracts.

The quartet of new GOES satellites replace a previous generation of weather observers built by Boeing and launched between 2006 and 2010. The GOES-R series should keep NOAA's geostationary weather satellites active through 2036.

NOAA also has a fleet of polar-orbiting weather satellites circling a few hundred miles above Earth, providing vital data inputs to numerical models that predict conditions up to a week in advance. The agency's newest polar-orbiting satellite, JPSS 1, launched in November from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

ULA will return the Atlas 5 rocket's mobile platform to the company's hangar near the Complex 41 launch pad in the coming days, wh ere ground crews will begin preparing for the workhorse launcher's next mission from Cape Canaveral set for launch April 12.

The next Atlas 5 launch, codenamed "AFSPC-11" will send the U.S. Air Force's EAGLE satellite into geostationary orbit using the most powerful variant of the rocket with five strap-on solid-fueled boosters.

EAGLE hosts five military experiments, according to Defense Department budget documents, including a deployable sub-satellite named MYCROFT that will conduct an unspecified mission on geostationary orbit.

The four-hour launch period April 12 extends from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT (2200-0200 GMT on April 12-13).

The next launch from Cape Canaveral will be a Falcon 9 rocket flight expected to lift off next week fr om the Complex 40 launch pad with the Spanish Hispasat 30W-6 communications satellite.

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НОРАД опубликовал первичные серии наборов TLE на объекты запуска

Код Выделить Развернуть

1 43226U 18022A 18061.12802865 -.00000178 00000-0 00000+0 0 9994
2 43226 9.6232 336.6849 4939025 177.9405 145.7845 1.88695946 05
1 43226U 18022A 18061.12802865 -.00000178 00000-0 00000+0 0 9994
2 43226 9.6232 336.6849 4939025 177.9405 145.7845 1.88695946 05
1 43226U 18022A 18061.18521300 -.00000178 00000-0 00000+0 0 9992
2 43226 9.7471 336.4279 4936516 178.2210 184.5843 1.88631566 03
1 43226U 18022A 18061.18525648 -.00000181 00000-0 00000+0 0 9995
2 43226 9.5254 337.0011 4805108 179.5691 180.4151 1.83899533 02
1 43226U 18022A 18061.18530070 -.00000178 00000-0 00000+0 0 9996
2 43226 9.7530 336.4432 4936775 178.2094 184.6418 1.88632718 06

1 43227U 18022B 18061.11629486 -.00000182 00000-0 00000+0 0 9995
2 43227 9.4682 337.1318 4802867 179.4435 134.7478 1.83853595 04
1 43227U 18022B 18061.11629486 -.00000182 00000-0 00000+0 0 9995
2 43227 9.4682 337.1318 4802867 179.4435 134.7478 1.83853595 04
1 43227U 18022B 18061.18628675 -.00000178 00000-0 00000+0 0 9996
2 43227 9.7526 336.4456 4936692 178.2081 185.3126 1.88631466 05
1 43227U 18022B 18061.18675161 -.00000181 00000-0 00000+0 0 9992
2 43227 9.5254 337.0009 4805108 179.5693 181.4049 1.83899533 09

43226 : 7 622 x 34 947 km x 9.623°
43227 : 8 250 x 35 286 km x 9.468°

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НОРАД идентифицировал объекты запуска

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Jonathan McDowell‏Подлинная учетная запись @planet4589 4 ч.4 часа назад

GOES-S and Centaur AV-077 tracked in 8241 x 35285 km x 9.5 deg, 7631 x 34950 km x 9.8 deg orbits

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Orlando International Airport@MCO·16 ч

Awesome moment captured in Orlando of @ulalaunch's Atlas V rocket launch as @FlyFrontier's Buck the Pronghorn looks on from the sky.

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http://spaceflight101.com/photos-atlas-v-leaps-off-from-florida-with-goes-s/

Photos: Atlas V Leaps Off From Florida with GOES-S
March 2, 2018

A United Launch Alliance thundered off from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 41 at 22:02 UTC on March 1st, 2018 with the GOES-S weather satellite. Punching into the afternoon clouds over Florida's Space Coast, Atlas V embarked on a three-and-a-half hour mission taking it halfway around the globe to send the 5,200-Kilogram satellite on its way to become the second in the fourth-generation of GOES satellites to enter operation alongside GOES-R that launched in 2016 and has already proven the new spacecraft's upgrades by watching over the 2017 hurricane season.

>> Read our Launch Recap

All Photos below: United Launch Alliance

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All Photos below: Erik Kuna, erikkuna.com

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Scott Tilley‏ @coastal8049 30 мин. назад

#GOES17 passed through apogee at ~1935 UTC and no change of orbit noted. Just prior to reaching apogee ~1832 UTC TT&C unlocked from the ground and has been in that state since. If #GOES16 can be used as model first manoeuvre should happen perhaps on next apogee?

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Предупреждение: некоторые фотографии (ULA) приводились на форуме ранее...

https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/06/photos-atlas-5-blasts-off-with-goes-s-weather-satellite/

Photos: Atlas 5 blasts off with GOES-S weather satellite
March 6, 2018 Stephen Clark

NOAA's newest weather satellite, heading for a perch with coverage over the western United States and the Pacific Ocean, launched March 1 from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas 5 rocket.

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The 197-foot-tall (60-meter) rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, lifted off at 5:02 p.m. EST (2202 GMT) on March 1 from Cape Canaveral's Complex 41 launch pad. The Lockheed Martin-built GOES-S weather satellite rode the Atlas 5 rocket into orbit.

These photos show the rocket lifting off with more than 2 million pounds of thrust from a liquid-fueled RD-180 main engine and four solid rocket boosters.

Read our full story on the launch for details.


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: NASA/Bill White


Credit: Lockheed Martin


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now

IMG WIDTH=675 HEIGHT=1013]https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/39853231794_1288f68767_k.jpg[/IMG];
Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett


Credit: Lockheed Martin


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: United Launch Alliance


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now


Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now

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Atlas V GOES-S: Aerial Views Leading to Launch

  United Launch Alliance

Опубликовано: 6 мар. 2018 г.

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Atlas V GOES-S Rocket Cam

  United Launch Alliance

Опубликовано: 9 мар. 2018 г.

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NOAA Satellites‏Подлинная учетная запись @NOAASatellites 51 мин. назад

Today is a big day for our #GOESS satellite, it has reached geostationary orbit and has officially received a new name...#GOES17! After a checkout of its instruments and systems it will capture this view for us in the GOES West position. Learn more: https://goo.gl/D4PddL 

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/12/new-noaa-weather-satellite-reaches-geostationary-orbit/

New NOAA weather satellite reaches geostationary orbit
March 12, 2018 | Stephen Clark


Artist's concept of the GOES-17 satellite in orbit. Credit: Lockheed Martin

Less than two weeks after its launch from Cape Canaveral, a new NOAA weather observatory has boosted itself into a circular orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator, and officials have renamed it GOES-17 ahead of a test series before it enters service later this year.

NOAA traditionally switches from a letter to a number designation for its weather satellites after they reach their operational geostationary orbit. This time, the GOES-S satellite became GOES-17.

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"Today is a big day for the GOES-S satellite," NOAA said in a statement. "It has reached geostationary orbit (22,300 miles out in space) and has now officially received a new name...GOES-17! The satellite will be called GOES-17 for the remainder of its lifespan. GOES satellites are designated with a letter prior to launch and a number once they achieve geostationary orbit."

GOES-17 will begin collecting operational weather data over the western United States and the Pacific Ocean before the end of 2018, officials said.

Since its liftoff March 1 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, the GOES-S satellite has fired its Japanese-built main engine several times to circularize its orbit from an initial elliptical transfer orbit to a circular perch nearly 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers) above the equator. At that altitude, the spacecraft's movement maintains pace with Earth's rotation, giving it a fixed field-of-view.

GOES-17 should complete its final deployments in the coming days, beginning with the second stage unfurling of its solar arrays Tuesday. The power-generating solar wing completed an initial deployment step a few hours after launch.

Manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the satellite will also extend antennas to transmit and receive X-band, S-band and L-band signals, and finally deploy a magnetometer boom fitted with sensors to measure the magnetic field around the satellite, data that could help predict geomagnetic storms and other space weather disruptions.

GOES-17 will maneuver into a checkout position in geostationary orbit at 89.5 degrees west longitude later this month. Post-launch testing and calibration should begin March 26, and the first imagery from GOES-17 is expected in mid-May, NOAA said.

"GOES-17 will undergo a six-month on-orbit checkout of its instruments and systems, followed by operational handover procedures," NOAA said in a statement. "The satellite move to its operational location at 137 degrees west longitude in late 2018 and become NOAA's GOES West."

NOAA's newest weather satellite joins an identical craft named GOES-16, which launched in November 2016 and entered service in the GOES East position in December, providing real-time weather imagery over the eastern United States and hurricane zones in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

With GOES-16 and GOES-17 operating in tandem, forecasters will have sharper, more frequent views of storms, fog, wildfires and other phenomena ranging from New Zealand to the west coast of Africa.

The latest pair of GOES weather satellites, plus two more due for launch in 2020 and 2024, carry upgraded imagers that can see clouds, lightning, fog, smoke and ash in the atmosphere in much greater resolution and spectral detail than earlier weather observatories. The imagers also return pictures of storms with greater frequency — as often as every 30 seconds.

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υѕα ѕαт¢σм‏ @usa_satcom 21 мар.


GOES-17 this evening around 89W with a good TLM signal on 1693 MHz.

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GOES-S Atlas V Launch in 360

NASAKennedy

Опубликовано: 22 мар. 2018 г.

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Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust 7 мин. назад

NOAA says it's dealing with "a performance issue with the cooling system encountered during commissioning of the GOES-17 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI)instrument." More details in a media telecon at noon EDT today.

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Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust 50 мин. назад

Summary of NOAA GOES-17 media call: cooling issue affects near-IR and IR bands for part of the day; still investigating the problem and potential impacts to forecasting if it can't be fixed.

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/05/23/noaas-new-goes-17-weather-satellite-has-degraded-vision-at-night/

NOAA's new GOES-17 weather satellite has degraded vision at night
May 23, 2018 | Stephen Clark


Artist's illustration of the GOES-17 satellite in space. Credit: Lockheed Martin

Engineers are studying a malfunction with the main imaging instrument on NOAA's GOES-17 weather satellite, launched March 1, that could limit the observatory's ability to monitor storms, winds and other weather phenomena at night, officials said Wednesday.

A cooling system aboard the satellite is unable to chill infrared detectors inside the Advanced Baseline Imager on GOES-17 to proper temperatures, degrading the camera's performance.

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The imager is designed to be sensitive to light in 16 channels, including 13 infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, and three colors in the visible spectrum. The thermal control anomaly currently under investigation affects the 13 infrared and near-infrared channels, according to Steve Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA's satellite and information service.

"This is a serious problem," Volz said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. "This is the premier Earth-pointing instrument on the GOES platform, and 16 channels, of which 13 are infrared or near-infrared, are important elements of our observing requirements, and if they are not functioning fully, it is a loss. It is a performance issue we have to address."

Detectors for the infrared channels must be cooled to around 60 Kelvin (minus 351 degrees Fahrenheit) to make them fully sensitive to infrared light coming fr om Earth's atmosphere. For about 12 hours each day, the cooler inside the Advanced Baseline Imager, or ABI, is unable to chill the detectors to such cold temperatures, officials said.

Infrared images fr om weather satellites are used to monitor storms at night, when darkness renders visible imagery unavailable. The three visible channels fr om the ABI are not affected by the cooling problem.

"The other wavelengths, the near-infrared and infrared wavelengths — the other 13 — need to be cooled to some extent beyond the capability of the system at present," said Tim Walsh, NOAA's program manager for the GOES-R weather satellite series. "There's a portion of the day centered around satellite local midnight where the data is not usable, and that's what we're addressing."

GOES-17 is parked in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator, where the satellite circles Earth at the same rate of the planet's rotation, giving its instruments a fixed field-of-view. Since its launch March 1 from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas 5 rocket, GOES-17 has activated its other sensors, including a lightning detector and space weather payloads, without any problems to begin a planned six-month test campaign.

But the ABI is the centerpiece instrument on GOES-17.

Designed and built by Harris Corp. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the imager is intended to provide satellite imagery of clouds, cyclones, storm fronts, fog, wildfires and other phenomena for use by forecasters. It's the same imagery that is regularly broadcast on television weather reports.

An identical satellite named GOES-16 launched in November 2016, and it entered service late last year after a thorough checkout. GOES-16, known as GOES-R before launch, was the first if four modernized weather satellites developed in an $11 billion program by NOAA.

GOES-16 covers the eastern United States, the Atlantic Ocean and South America, with coverage extending to West Africa to track low pressure systems that could form tropical storms and hurricanes. The launch of GOES-17, previously named GOES-S, followed in March, and NOAA said the new satellite would begin observations by the end of the year to provide coverage over the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and the Pacific Ocean extending to New Zealand.


The Advanced Baseline Imager on NOAA's GOES-16 satellite, which is identical to GOES-17, is fully operational. This image from GOES-16 was captured in March. Credit: NOAA

Joe Pica, director of operations at NOAA's National Weather Service, said meteorologists also feed infrared data from GOES satellites into numerical weather prediction models, providing upper level and mid-level wind inputs and water vapor measurements to help improve the accuracy of forecasters. Those infrared observations are required not just at night, but all day.

"If efforts to restore the cooling system are not successful, we are looking at alternative concepts and different modes to maximize the operational utility of this ABI for NOAA's National Weather Service and other customers going forward," Volz said.

NOAA's GOES-15 weather satellite, launched in 2010, is currently operating in the "GOES-West" location wh ere GOES-17 was destined. The weather agency also has a backup spacecraft, the nearly nine-year-old GOES-14 satellite, in standby mode, ready to take over if one of the operational observatories fails.

"We have two spacecraft that we could use to augment whatever we do in the GOES-West area," Walsh said.

"Our delivery of services is not impacted," Volz said. "It's our future capability that we would have enhanced by the extra performance of GOES-17 to be delivered in the coming year that is on the table right now for discussion."

The Advanced Baseline Imager carried on NOAA's new generation of GOES weather satellites can capture more vivid views of storms than cameras aboard older weather craft, and record images quicker.

The ABI can return scans of an entire hemisphere once every 15 minutes, half the time needed by one of NOAA's earlier geostationary spacecraft. The imager can scan the continental United States once every 5 minutes.

The new ABI-equipped satellites can return pictures of hotspots like hurricanes at a cadence of once every 30 seconds, an improvement from the five-minute rapid scans available today. The imager can simultaneously scan the broader hemisphere in its field-of-view and capture close-up views of individual storm systems, giving forecasters refreshed views of hurricanes and tornado outbreaks.

The 16-channel ABI can yield deeper insights into moisture levels and cloud types unavailable with previous weather satellite images. Earlier GOES satellites had imagers sensitive to five different parts of the light spectrum.

The upgrade allows meteorologists to distinguish between snow, fog, clouds, volcanic ash, and other particles suspended in the atmosphere.


Technicians install the Advanced Baseline Imager on the GOES-S weather satellite, now named GOES-17, before its launch. Credit: Lockheed Martin

Engineers continue investigating the cause of the cooling system malfunction inside GOES-17's imager, and officials remained hopeful Wednesday that the problem could be corrected, or at least mitigated.

"We're treating this very seriously with a multi-agency and contractor technical team to try and undertand the anomaly and find ways to start the engine, if you will, of the cooling system to function properly," Volz said. "Doing this remotely from 22,000 miles below, only looking at the on-orbit data, is a challenge," Volz said.

"What we're seeing on (GOES) 17 is that we can only achieve that (60 Kelvin) operating temperature about half of the day ... Over the couse of the orbit, we see different thermal conditions, different sun conditions that change how hot the instrument gets," said Pam Sullivan, GOES-R flight project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "During the hot part of the orbit, the thermal load increases to the point that we're not able to cool the detectors down."

The instrument is hottest while the satellite is over the night side of Earth because the sun is positioned off the limb of the planet, and shining in the camera's aperture.

The cooler is supposed to transfer heat from the instrument and discharge it to space via a heat pipe and a radiator. The thermal system works by cycling a fluid named propylene between the ABI instrument and the radiator. Engineers think they have narrowed the problem to the heat pipe/radiator system.

"The problem is that the cryocooler, the mechanical cooler, is overheating because the heat pipes that transport heat from the cryocooler to the external radiator, that heat pipe/radiator system does not seem to be working as intended right now," Sullivan said.

Investigators are examining the performance from the identical imager on GOES-16, as well as similar imagers on Japan's Himawari 8 and 9 weather satellites, which were also built by Harris and are working normally.

"People have dug in, we're not even close to out of ideas," she said. "There are lots of lines of inquiry of things that could be the problem and lots of ideas about things to try to address those, and also a lot of work about what can we do to improve the situation, even if the thermal performance doesn't improve."

Even if engineers are unable to get the cooling system to full functionality, Volz said GOES-17's imager would still be "partially usable."

"The worst-case scenario does not mean we don't have any channels in infrared," Volz said. "We are getting degraded performance on the infrared and near-infrared channels, not zero performance but degraded."

"We're trying to assess what exactly the performance is, and the visible (channels) are working quite well," he said. "We still have a highly capable functioning spacecraft and mission, even under the current operating conditions that we're seeing in the initial test period."

But reduced performance could prevent forecasters from relying on the satellite as the primary weather sentinel over a broad segment of the United States and neighboring waters.

"Whether we fix it completely or we do not fix it completely, how do we maximize the mission? I think that's wh ere the team is focusing right now," Walsh said.

NOAA has two more GOES satellites — GOES-T and GOES-U — set for launch in the coming years. They will host the same type of Advanced Baseline Imager as GOES-17.

Volz said it was too early to say whether NOAA could move up the GOES-T launch date to replace the observing capacity that GOES-17 was expected to fill.

GOES-T is set for launch in May 2020, followed by GOES-U in 2024. NASA, which oversees the launch of NOAA weather satellites, has not selected launch provider for either mission, but United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket and SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher are expected to compete for the contracts.

The four new-generation GOES spacecraft are manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

"The first thing we need to understand the anomaly and whether or not it affects the other elements, the GOES-T and U spacecraft and missions, because those ABIs are complete and are in our hands," Volz said.

"We have not defined new launch dates. There are some things you can't move up too much. We have prepared GOES-T for a 2020 launch, and at this point it's premature to say wh ere or how we would change that launch date."

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