Updated 11-18-2021 NOAA and NASA are now targeting March 1, 2022, as the new launch date for NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite T (GOES-T) mission. The launch was recently scheduled for February 16, 2022. However, shifts in launch dates for missions scheduled ahead of GOES-T prompted NASA, NOAA, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) to coordinate the new date.
NOAA and NASA are now targeting March 1, 2022, as the new launch date for NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite T (GOES-T) mission. The launch was recently scheduled for February 16, 2022. However, shifts in launch dates for missions scheduled ahead of GOES-T prompted NASA, NOAA, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) to coordinate the new date.
This is a lot to ingest, below is the summary:
- Transition plan swaps GOES-17 with GOES-18 as the operational GOES-West satellite Assumes successful launch and checkout of GOES-T/18
- Incorporates early drift of GOES-18 to the West operational longitude
- Allows for early operational use of GOES-18 ABI after Beta maturity is achieved
- The transition plan incorporates RF conflict mitigation between GOES-17/18 X-band and T&C uplinks/downlinks
- Users do not need to re-point antennas
- GOES-18 will be drifted to 136.8W to complete instrument PLT activities
- 0.4 deg offset from GOES-17 allows X-band RDL downlink from both G17/G18
- 0.2 deg offset from 137.0W meets ground product generation requirements
- Both GOES-17 and GOES-18 images will be re-mapped to 137.0W
- GOES-18 ABI data available to support August GOES-17 ABI warm period
- GOES-18 ABI data available via Cloud interface and interleaving with GOES-17 non-ABI product data
- After the operational transition, GOES-18 is nudged over to 137.2W
- GOES-17 drifted to 105W and placed in on-orbit storage.
GOES T Transition from Launch to Operations Timeline PowerPoint View as PDF.