Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By The Watchers
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

GOES satellites changed positions in space

Tuesday, October 2, 2012 8:10

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) on Sept. 24 said it has moved a spare geostationary weather satellite, GOES-14, into position to replace the GOES-13 satellite that suffered an unexplained outage Sept. 23 that engineers have been unable to fix. GOES-14 will remain the primary GOES satellite over the Atlantic basin and Continental U.S. until the imager and sounder data issues on GOES-13 can be fully diagnosed and hopefully fixed.

NOAA’s geostationary satellites are typically centered over 75 degrees west longitude (GOES East) and 135 degrees (GOES West). However, when the satellite in the GOES East position began having data quality issues, the backup satellite GOES-14 was called into service. From its position at 105 degrees west longitude, it has been acting as GOES East for the past week. NOAA has decided that it is time to move GOES-14 into the traditional GOES East spot in space, replacing GOES-13. The maneuver began on October 1, 2012 and will take 33 days. At that time, GOES-13 will be moved into a storage spot where work to diagnose and fix the data quality issues from the imager and sounder instruments will continue. (NNVL)

GOES-14 has been brought online to provide additional operational coverage during the GOES eclipse season, the period where Earth comes between the GOES spacecraft and the Sun, obscuring the measurement for a brief period each day. After the eclipse season (on or around October 16^th), GOES-14 will become the primary, and only, operational X-ray measurement platform (both XRS and SXI) during planned maintenance for GOES-15. After the GOES-15 maintenance (on or around October 30^th), GOES-14 will return to storage and GOES-15 will once again be the primary, and only, operational X-ray measurement platform. (NOAA/SWPC)