The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES-U weather satellite will launch Tuesday evening from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, expanding a decades-long record of land weather and solar observations as part of NOAA’s GOES program.
NOAA’s GOES program is perhaps best known for providing advanced images and measurements of the weather, atmosphere, oceans and lightning in the Western Hemisphere. The information is critical for helping weather forecasters identify and track events such as hurricanes and wildfires. Instruments on the satellites can also observe solar activity and space weather, which can influence our technology on Earth.
GOES-U, which will be renamed GOES-19 once it enters orbit, will capture the same critical weather observations as its predecessors, ultimately replacing an existing weather satellite monitoring the Atlantic, Central, and Southern – and North America.
But the satellite is also flying a new instrument on its solar point platform, which will continuously monitor our sun for dramatic eruptions on its surface, called coronal mass ejections. If these eruptions are aimed at Earth, they can displace our planet’s magnetic field and affect our technology. High-impact eruptions are known to knock out communications systems and power grids and create displays of the Northern and Southern Lights.
In May, a series of coronal mass ejections hit Earth, creating one of the most impressive northern and southern lights displays in centuries. The storm also caused power outages in some areas of the Earth and disrupted radio and GPS signals. The storm came as the sun enters its most active period in two decades, causing more flares and explosions on the surface. Scientists say Earth is overdue for an even larger event, which has been known to disrupt communications systems around the world in the past.
The new instrument can help forecasters and grid operators prepare for an upcoming storm through early detection. The Compact Coronagraph-1 blocks the bright disk of the sun, just like an artificial total solar eclipse. The coronagraph allows 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,” Elsayed Talaat, director of NOAA’s space weather observing agency, said at a news conference Monday.
Talaat added that the data could help space weather forecasters provide warnings of Earth-directed solar storms one to four days in advance.
“This will be the first operational coronagraph to provide images specifically for space weather forecasters,” said Robert Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “Coronagraph data is essential for identifying, analyzing and predicting coronal mass ejections.”
The instrument takes images and sends them back to Earth within 30 minutes, a vast improvement over the outdated satellite instrument scientists currently rely on. Launched nearly three decades ago, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) at the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory can take up to eight hours to provide images of a coronal mass ejection.
“It’s amazing that this spacecraft and instrument lasted so long, but now it needs to be replaced,” said Arnaud Thernisien, a research physicist at the US Naval Research Laboratory who led the development of the new coronagraph, in an e-mail. -mail.
The new coronagraph will capture at least three images of each Earth-directed coronal mass ejection and will come into effect during extreme solar storms. The images will also come back much cleaner and at higher resolution than LASCO images, Talaat said. He said the spacecraft is built to withstand the tumultuous space environment, which sometimes creates white dots 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 Irradiance Sensors, which have flown on other GOES satellites. The two instruments provide information about other aspects of the sun, including plasma temperatures, particle emissions and solar flares. Solar flares are large bursts of radiation from the Sun, sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections.
Together, the instruments will “see and feel the solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can send billions of tons of highly magnetized material toward Earth at millions of miles per hour,” Talaat said at Monday’s news conference.
“The combination of these instruments on board GOES will allow one spacecraft to give us a holistic view of space weather events,” said Steenburgh. “We are in good shape to respond quickly.”
The GOES compact coronagraph is one of three coronagraphs that will be placed on future spacecraft, part of NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On Program. Another will be installed on the Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1, which will be launched in 2025 and will be placed 1 million kilometers from Earth and take measurements of the Sun. A third will be installed on the European Space Agency’s Vigil spacecraft, launching in mid-2020, which will be 100 million miles from Earth and provide a stereoscopic view of the Sun.
“It is essential that we be vigilant in our space weather observations to protect our economy, national security and individual safety, both here on Earth and in space,” Talaat said at the press conference on Monday.