The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES-U weather satellite is scheduled to launch Tuesday evening from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, extending a decade-long record of ground-based weather and solar observations as part of NOAA’s GOES program.
NOAA’s GOES program is probably best known for providing advanced images and measurements of the weather, atmosphere, oceans, and lightning in the Western Hemisphere. The information is critical to helping forecasters identify and track events, such as hurricanes and wildfires. Instruments on satellites can also monitor solar activity and space weather, which can affect our technology on Earth.
GOES-U, which will be renamed GOES-19 once it reaches orbit, will capture the same critical weather observations as its predecessors, eventually replacing an existing weather satellite monitoring the Atlantic Ocean, Central, South and North America.
But the satellite also operates a new instrument on its Sunspot Platform that will constantly monitor our sun for dramatic eruptions on its surface, called coronal mass ejections. If directed toward Earth, these eruptions could push our planet’s magnetic field and affect our technology. Very powerful eruptions have been known to knock out communication systems and power grids, as well as create images of northern and southern lights.
In May, a series of coronal mass ejections hit Earth to create one of the most spectacular northern and southern lights in centuries. The storm also caused voltage irregularities in some areas of Earth and disrupted radio and GPS signals. The storm came as the sun entered its most active period in 20 years, triggering more flares and eruptions on its surface. Scientists say Earth is overdue for an even bigger event known to affect the world’s communication systems in the past.
The new tool can help forecasters and grid operators prepare for an approaching storm with early detection. The compact coronagraph-1 will block the sun’s bright disk, similar to an artificial total solar eclipse. The coronagraph will allow scientists to better study the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, where coronal mass ejections can be observed.
The compact coronagraph will be a “game changer for space weather observations,” Elsaed Talaat, director of NOAA’s Office of Space Weather Observations, said at a news conference Monday.
Talaat added that the data could help forecasters in space issue warnings of Earth-bound solar storms one to four days in advance.
“This will be the first operational coronagraph providing images specifically for space weather forecasting,” said Robert Steenberg, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “Coronograph data is essential for identifying, analyzing and predicting coronal mass ejections.”
The instrument will take images and send them back to Earth within 30 minutes, a vast improvement over the aging satellite instrument scientists currently rely on. Launched nearly three decades ago, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Wide Angle and Spectrometric Coronarograph (LASCO) can take up to eight hours to provide images of a coronal mass ejection.
“It’s amazing that this spacecraft and instrument lasted this long, but now they need to be replaced,” Arnaud Ternisien, a research physicist at the US Naval Research Laboratory who led the development of the new coronagraph, said in an email.
The new coronagraph will take at least three images of each Earth-bound coronal mass ejection and will operate during extreme solar storms. The images will also come back much cleaner and higher resolution than the LASCO images, Talaat said. He said the spacecraft was built to withstand the turbulent space environment that sometimes produces white spots on LASCO images during extreme space weather events.
The Compact Coronagraph joins two other space weather instruments on the spacecraft, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Sensors, which have flown on other GOES satellites. Both instruments provide information on other aspects of the sun, including plasma temperatures, particle emissions and solar flares. Solar flares are large bursts of radiation from the sun that are sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections.
Together, the instruments will “see and sense the solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can send billions of tons of highly magnetized material hurtling toward Earth at several million miles per hour,” Talaat said at Monday’s news conference.
“The combination of these instruments aboard GOES will allow one spacecraft to give us a comprehensive view of space weather events,” Steenberg said. “We’ll be in good shape to respond quickly.”
The GOES Compact Coronagraph is one of three coronagraphs to be placed on future spacecraft as part of NOAA’s Space Weather Tracking Program. Another will be installed on the Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1, launching in 2025, which will be located 1 million miles from Earth and take measurements of the sun. A third will be installed on the European Space Agency’s Vigil spacecraft, which will launch in mid-2020 and will be located 100 million miles from Earth and provide a stereoscopic view of the sun.
“It is vital that we remain vigilant in our observations of space weather to protect our economy, national security and personal safety, both here on Earth and in space,” Talaat said at Monday’s news conference.
