NOAA is still having problems with GOES 15, also known as GOES West, the newest of the two major weather satellites in orbit over the earth. GOES-P was launched on March 4, 2010 and has reached geostationary orbit and was renamed GOES-15. The first visible image from GOES-15 arrived on April 6, 2010 and the first Infrared arrived on April 26, 2010.
On Wednesday NOAA issued this message of an outage:
*Topic: *GOES-15 West data outage.
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*Date/Time Issued**: *March 21, 2012, 2125 UTC *Product(s) or Data Impacted: *GOES-15*
*West Imager and Sounder Data* *
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*Date/Time of Initial Impact:**
*March 21, 2012, 2045 UTC**
*Date/Time of Expected End:*Unknown**
*Length of Outage:*TBD
*Details/Specifics of Change:* ESPC is currently not receiving GOES-15 West data due to a bad momentum unload. GOES-15 went into a sun acquisition mode and is unable to do any imaging. Operations personnel are trying to place GOES-13 into a full disk imaging mode.*
As of this morning the satellite was still not operational according to NOAA personnel. The following status was issued this morning:
GOES-15 (west) DOY81 20:45z The s/c autonomously transitioned into Sun Acquisition mode due to an incorrect plan that was used to adjust s/c momentum. The s/c attitude is stable and all s/c subsystems are nominal. All payloads and user services are powered off which is expected while in Sun Acq. mode. Recovery activities are on-going. The estimated time for returning GOES-15 to service is no earlier than DOY83 16:00z.
While most people think of satellites as something that takes pictures of the earth, the GOES satellites do much, much more. Click on this link to view a list of affected products and as you'll see, it's not a small list. One theory about what caused the outage has to do with the potential effects of the solar storm we received not long ago. Meteorologist from the NWS and NCEP had several comments about the cause and impacts from the outage.
"Here at NCEP we are missing about 10 out of nearly 100 satellite products we ingest...only three deemed "critical" to the models. Might have a minor impact but hard to say. "
"An uncommanded satellite response-I wonder if it could have been due to a SEU (Single Event Upset) brought on by the Van Allen dumping event of high energy electrons that has been occurring in conjunction with and in the wake of the recent Geomagnetic disturbance. Such dumping episodes in the past have done a number on some Geosats including killing them entirely."
If they can't GOES 15 operational again, it would be possible to reactivate GOES 14, which is still parked in a geostationary orbit, and bring it back into service. But according to the satellite meteorologist, it takes 3 days to take it out of storage and 2 days to calibrate before it can resume operations.