New Storm Forecaster Launched

Just in time for hurricane season, NASA launched a weather satellite Monday to monitor storms brewing on Earth and streaming this way from the sun.

The nation's latest GOES satellite rocketed through clouds and into orbit before dawn on a mission costing more than $380 million. It will serve as a backup in case one of the two primary Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites fails.

Unlike previous weather satellites, this one carries an X-ray telescope that will capture an image of the sun's outer atmosphere once every minute to warn of incoming geomagnetic and radiation storms. That's 1,440 pictures per day or 525,600 per year.

"This weather affects really billions of dollars of assets and the services provided by them, from communication satellites and navigation satellites to electrical power grids, and even impacts the international space station at times," said program manager
Steve Hill of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's space environment center in Boulder, Colo.

The data will be transmitted to Earth in just 36 seconds, between the once-a-minute picture-taking.

"It's a tremendous boost in warning time," Hill said.

Liftoff of the GOES-M satellite was postponed one day by thunderstorms. Lightning struck an adjacent launch pad Saturday night, and Lockheed Martin Corp. wanted to make sure its Atlas rocket with the weather satellite was undamaged. Previous rocket
trouble forced a one-week delay.

GOES-M will be renamed GOES-12 once it reaches its intended 22,000-mile-high orbit in two weeks. It will remain in high-flying storage until NOAA calls it into action.

Two GOES satellites currently are in operation, one overlooking the East Coast and the Atlantic and the other gazing down at the West Coast and the Pacific, including Hawaii. One has exceeded its design lifetime but is still performing well despite some problems; the other is closing in on its five-year lifetime.

NOAA also has another spare in orbit, GOES-11, launched last year.

Program manager Gerry Dittberner said it's unclear which satellite will be pressed into service first, GOES-11 or the soon-to-be-named GOES-12. NOAA would like to start using the solar X-ray imager as soon as possible, and that may prompt the newest
satellite to be next in line, he said.

It will take three months to check the satellite, bringing it to life before the hurricane season ends.

By Marcia Dunn
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