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 decades-long record of terrestrial and solar weather observations as part of the NOAA GOES program.
NOAA’s GOES program is probably best known for providing advanced imagery and measurements of the Western Hemisphere’s weather, atmosphere, oceans, and lightning. This information is essential in helping weather forecasters identify and track events such as hurricanes and wildfires. Instruments on satellites can also observe solar activity and space weather, which can affect our technology on Earth.
GOES-U, which will be renamed GOES-19 once in orbit, will capture these same critical weather observations as its predecessors, ultimately replacing an existing weather satellite monitoring the Atlantic Ocean, Central America, South America and the ‘North America.
But the satellite is also flying a new instrument on its solar point platform, which will constantly monitor our sun for spectacular flares on its surface called coronal mass ejections. If they target Earth, these eruptions can disrupt our planet’s magnetic field and affect our technology. Very powerful eruptions have been known to destroy communications systems and power grids, as well as create displays of the Northern and Southern Lights.
In May, a series of coronal mass ejections hit Earth to create one of the most impressive aurora displays in centuries. The storm also caused voltage irregularities in some areas of Earth and interfered with radio and GPS signals. The storm came as the sun enters its most active period in 20 years, producing more flares and flares on its surface. Scientists say Earth is overdue for an even bigger event, which has already affected communications systems around the world in the past.
The new instrument could help forecasters and network operators prepare for an approaching storm through early detection. The Compact Coronagraph-1 will block the bright disk of the sun, like 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,” Elsayed Talaat, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Observations Office, said at a news conference Monday.
Talaat added that the data could help space weather forecasters issue warnings about solar storms headed toward Earth one to four days in advance.
“This will be the first operational coronagraph providing 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 will take images and send them back to Earth within 30 minutes, a significant improvement over the aging satellite instrument that scientists currently rely on. Launched nearly thirty years ago, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Wide-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 is amazing that this spacecraft and instrument have lasted so long, but now they need to be replaced,” Arnaud Thernisien, a physics researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who led development of the new coronagraph, said in an email. .
The new coronagraph will capture at least three images of each coronal mass ejection directed toward Earth and operate during extreme solar storms. The images will also be much sharper and with higher resolution than images from LASCO, Talaat said. He said the spacecraft was built to withstand the tumultuous space environment, which sometimes creates white spots on LASCO images during extreme space weather events.
The compact coronagraph joins two other space weather instruments installed on the spacecraft, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance 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 explosions of solar radiation, sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections.
Together, the instruments will “see and detect solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can send billions of tons of highly magnetized material toward Earth at several million kilometers per hour,” Talaat said during the press conference on Monday.
“The combination of these instruments aboard GOES will allow a single spacecraft to give us a holistic view of space weather events,” Steenburgh said. “We will be able to respond quickly.”
The GOES Compact Coronagraph is one of three coronagraphs that will 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, launched in 2025, which will be positioned 1 million kilometers from Earth and take measurements of the sun. A third will be installed on the European Space Agency’s Vigil spacecraft, launched in the mid-2020s and will be 100 million kilometers from Earth and offer a stereoscopic view of the sun.
“It is essential that we be vigilant in our space weather observations to protect our economy, our national security and our individual safety, both here on Earth and in space,” Talaat said during Monday’s press conference.