CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The green lights continue to shine, leading to the launch of America’s powerful weather satellite.
GOES-Uthe fourth and final member of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) next-generation GOES-R weather series satelliteswas cleared for its scheduled Tuesday (June 25) launch after an in-depth readiness check on Monday (June 24).
The two-hour launch window for GOES-U opens at 5:16 p.m. EDT (2116 GMT) on Tuesday. The spacecraft will ride on SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here on the space coast weather permitting. It will be Falcon Heavy’s 10th launch overall and 65th orbital liftoff in 2024. SpaceX.
You can watch the launch live in the window above and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of NASA. Coverage will begin at 3:00 PM EDT (1900 GMT) at the earliest.
Late Monday afternoon (June 24), members of the mission and operations teams briefed the media on the final checklist items for Tuesday’s launch.
“The GOES-U spacecraft is ready, the launch vehicle is ready, and we’re looking forward to getting the spacecraft into orbit,” Denton Gibson, mission manager for NASA’s Launch Services Program, said during a press conference Monday.
It took a bit of work to get everything ready. For example, on Sunday evening (June 23), as they prepared to launch GOES-U and Falcon Heavy onto the pad on Monday, the launch team discovered a problem with the transport’s air conditioning (AC) system.
“The system has redundant parallel systems in it, and one of those legs didn’t work,” Julianna Schiman, NASA’s director of science missions at SpaceX, said at a briefing Monday. “We decided to keep the vehicle safe and make sure the AC transport unit was fully functional. Now this transport unit is fully functional and providing very cold air.”
But this is Florida. So while it’s all systems go, the big question remains: Will Mother Nature cooperate?
“We’ll go with a 70% chance of violation, or a 30% chance of ‘going’ for all the weather rules we evaluate,” Brian Cizek, weather service chief US Space Force‘s 45th Weather Squadron, he said during a briefing Monday.
Here is a set of 10 weather rulesor criteria that must be met for the run to continue. In typical Florida fashion, there are fears that afternoon thunderstorms could materialize or that clouds could build up that would lead to the Falcon Heavy producing its own lightning during launch. That would be a dangerous situation.
“It is interesting that a rocket it can actually trigger a lightning strike that it shouldn’t [otherwise] “Certain types of clouds at certain levels of the atmosphere can actually hold a charge that is not strong enough for a natural strike, but could produce a lightning strike.” So that’s what these rules are designed to protect against.”
However, the two-hour launch window will give the team a real chance to get off the ground.
“Even if you break in one part of the window, we can move things as the weather looks better,” Cizek said. “So if it looks worse at the beginning of the window, we can move towards the middle or the end of the window if we see the storms start to die down. I think there will be an opportunity and we will work closely together.” with our launch weather team.”
Like its satellite siblings, GOES-U will have plenty of scientific bells and whistles. The new spacecraft’s instruments will provide state-of-the-art advanced imaging. It will also study Earth’s weather, oceans and environment in detail, including conducting real-time mapping of lightning activity. GOES-U’s science equipment includes updates and improvements over its predecessor instruments and carries a brand new compact coronagraph a tool you can help with space weather predictions.
You can Watch the launch live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA. Coverage will begin at 3:00 PM EDT (1900 GMT) at the earliest.
It will be the successor to NOAA’s GOES-R series Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite system., planned launch in the early 1930s.