Cooling failure threatens NOAA’s newest weather satellite
By Paul VoosenMay. 23, 2018 , 4:10 PM
A balky cooling system in the chill of space is throwing the future of the United States’s most recent multibillion-dollar weather satellite, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-17 (GOES-17), in doubt, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported today. Technicians are now scrambling to understand the problem, which first arose several weeks ago on the satellite’s primary instrument.
Launched on 1 March, GOES-17 is NOAA’s second next-generation geostationary weather satellite, the second of a four-part, $11 billion program. Following 6 months of evaluation, the satellite was set to monitor the western half of the United States, much as its sibling, GOES-16, launched in 2016, now surveys the country’s eastern half. To do so, GOES-17 would use a 16-channel camera, called the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), that is capable of capturing wind height, rain, and clouds in fine detail.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/cooling-failure-threatens-noaa-s-newest-weather-satellite
