The first of four next-generation weather satellites has completed assembly at Lockheed Martin. The new Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite \u201cGOES-R\u201d will launch atop an Atlas V rocket in early 2016, ahead of providing significant improvements to monitoring the weather conditions over North America.<\/p>\n
\nGOES-R:<\/p>\n
The history of weather satellites working in geostationary orbits reaches back to the Delta 2914 launches of SMS-1 and SMS-2 in the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n
Those two spacecraft paved the way for the GOES program and a continual evolution in technology that has revolutionized weather monitoring and forecasting \u2013 one of the numerous benefits provided by space flight technology to people on Earth.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-06-03-212155\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/2015-06-03-212155-350x234.jpg\")
A large fleet of GOES spacecraft remain in space to this day. Most are either inactive or re-purposed, with GOES-3 no longer watching the weather but providing a communication links between the United States and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.<\/p>\n
GOES 12 through 15 are currently classed as active, with the latter the latest to launch back in 2010, atop the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV.<\/p>\n
GOES-P \u2013 as it was known during its checkout period \u2013 became the sixteenth spacecraft in the GOES fleet, and the last of the three current-generation GOES-N series spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).<\/p>\n
![\"2015-06-03-212304\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/2015-06-03-212304-350x248.jpg\")
GOES-R will be the next evolution and will ride to orbit on the ULA Altas V out of Cape Canaveral in March of next year.<\/p>\n
NASA educational resources (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n This new satellite will provide higher-resolution images of weather patterns and severe storms five times faster than is currently available, which will contribute to more accurate and reliable weather forecasts and severe weather outlooks.<\/p>\n One such example is its ability to provide images of weather pattern and severe storms as frequently as every 30 seconds.<\/p>\n GOES-R\u2019s data will support short-term weather forecasts and severe storm watches and warnings, maritime forecasts, seasonal predictions, drought outlooks and space weather predictions.<\/p>\n Additionally, GOES-R products will improve hurricane tracking and intensity forecasts, and increase thunderstorm and tornado warning lead time.<\/p>\n A key step towards its launch campaign was recently achieved at Lockheed Martin\u2019s facilities near Denver, with the company confirming on Wednesday that the spacecraft has completed its assembly phase.<\/p>\n \u201cNOAA\u2019s GOES satellites are our nation\u2019s weather sentinels and are vital to our severe storm prediction and warnings,\u201d noted Tim Gasparrini, vice president and GOES-R Series program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company.<\/p>\n \u201cNow that the first GOES-R Series satellite is complete and environmental testing is underway, we\u2019re one step closer to providing a necessary upgraded capability to NOAA and our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n That next phase of the processing flow for the satellite will involve a trip to a 65 foot-tall thermal vacuum chamber.<\/p>\n The satellite will also undergo a variety of additional tests including reverberant acoustic, separation and deployment shock, vibration, and electromagnetic interference and compatibility testing.<\/p>\n This will also be a key test of its suite of six instruments, namely the Advanced Baseline Imager, Extreme Ultra Violet\/X-Ray Irradiance Sensor, Geostationary Lightning Mapper, Magnetometer, Space Environmental In-Situ Suite and the Solar Ultraviolet Imager.<\/p>\n Lockheed Martin also designed and built the Solar Ultraviolet Imager and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper instruments that will fly aboard each of these new spacecraft.<\/p>\n The satellite will be able to operate through periodic station-keeping and momentum adjust maneuvers, which will allow for near-continuous instrument observation.<\/p>\n The GOES-R series operational lifetime extends through December 2036, with the final satellite in the new fleet scheduled to launch in 2025.<\/p>\n GOES-S will launch one year after GOES-R, both riding uphill on ULA\u2019s Atlas V in her 541 configuration out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.<\/p>\n (Images via Lockheed Martin and NOAA).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first of four next-generation weather satellites has completed assembly at Lockheed Martin. The new Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite \u201cGOES-R\u201d will launch atop an Atlas V rocket in early 2016, ahead of providing significant improvements to monitoring the weather conditions over North America. GOES-R: The history of weather satellites working in geostationary orbits reaches back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7758,2960,975,363],"class_list":["post-39322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-atlas-v","tag-goes","tag-noaa","tag-ula"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}See Also<\/h4>\n
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![\"2015-06-03-212121\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/2015-06-03-212121-350x298.jpg\")
Over the next two months, the satellite will be powered-on, tested in a vacuum and exposed to extreme cold and heat.<\/p>\n![\"2015-06-03-212013\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/2015-06-03-212013-350x306.jpg\")
The GOES-R spacecraft bus will be 3-axis stabilized and designed for 10 years of on-orbit operation preceded by up to 5 years of on-orbit storage.<\/p>\n