This new satellite is preparing us for a looming threat: large solar storms

At 5:26 p.m. on Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched its newest weather satellite — the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-U (GOES-U) — from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The satellite extends a decades-long record of terrestrial weather and solar observations as part of NOAA’s GOES program, which is probably best known for providing advanced imagery and measurements of the western hemisphere’s weather, atmosphere, oceans and lightning. The information is critical in helping weather forecasters identify and track events, like hurricanes and wildfires. Instruments on the satellites can also observe solar activity and space weather, which can affect our technology on Earth.

GOES-U, which will be renamed GOES-19 once it reaches orbit, will capture these same critical weather observations as its predecessors, eventually replacing an existing weather satellite overseeing the Atlantic Ocean as well as Central, South and North America.

But the satellite is also flying a new instrument on its solar point platform, which will constantly monitor our sun for dramatic eruptions on its surface called coronal mass ejections. If aimed at Earth, these eruptions can jostle our planet’s magnetic field and affect our technology. Very impactful eruptions have been known to knock out communication systems and power grids, as well as create displays of the northern and southern lights.

In May, coronal mass ejections hit Earth to create one of the most impressive northern and southern lights displays in centuries. The storm also caused voltage irregularities in some areas on Earth and interfered with radio and GPS signals.

The storm came as the sun enters its most active period in 20 years, producing more eruptions and flares on its surface. Scientists say Earth is overdue for an even larger event, which has been known to affect communication systems across the world in the past.

The new instrument could help forecasters and grid operators prepare for an incoming storm with early detection. The Compact Coronagraph-1, will block out the sun’s bright disk, like an artificial total solar eclipse. The coronagraph will allow scientists to better study the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, where coronal mass ejections can be observed.

The compact coronagraph will be a “game changer for space weather observations,” Elsayed Talaat, director of NOAA’s space weather observations office, said at a news conference Monday.

Talaat added that the data can help space weather forecasters issue warnings for Earth-directed solar storms one to four days in advance.

“This will be the first operational coronagraph providing imagery specifically for space weather forecasters,” said Robert Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “Coronagraph data is essential for identifying, analyzing, and forecasting coronal mass ejections.”

The instrument will snap images and send them back to Earth within 30 minutes, a huge improvement over the aging satellite instrument that scientists currently rely on. Launched nearly three decades ago, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory can take up to eight hours to deliver imagery of a coronal mass ejection.

“It is amazing that this spacecraft and instrument lasted for so long, but it is now due for a replacement,” Arnaud Thernisien, a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who led the development of the new coronagraph, said in an email.

The new coronagraph will capture at least three images of each Earth-directed coronal mass ejections and operate during extreme solar storms. The imagery will also come back much cleaner and at higher resolution than LASCO images, Talaat said. He said the spacecraft was built to withstand the tumultuous space environment, which sometimes creates white specks on LASCO imagery during extreme space weather events.

The compact coronagraph joins two other space weather instruments on the spacecraft, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors, which have flown on other GOES satellites. The two instruments provide information on other aspects of the sun, including plasma temperatures, particle emissions and solar flares. Solar flares are large bursts of radiation from the sun, which are sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections.

Together, the instruments will “see and sense the solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can send billions of tons of highly magnetized material hurtling toward Earth at several million miles an hour,” Talaat said at the Monday news conference.

“The combination of those instruments aboard GOES will allow one spacecraft to give us a holistic view of space weather events,” Steenburgh said. “We’ll be in good shape to react quickly.”

The GOES compact coronagraph is one of three coronagraphs to be placed on future spacecraft, part of NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On Program. Another will be installed on the Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1, launching in 2025, which will be positioned 1 million miles away from Earth and take measurements of the sun. A third one will be installed on European Space Agency Vigil spacecraft, which has been pushed back from a launch to the mid-2020s to the 2030s and will sit 100 million miles away from Earth and give a stereoscopic view of the sun.

“It is vital that we be vigilant in our space weather observations to protect our economy, national security and individual safety, both here on Earth and in space,” Talaat said at Monday’s news conference.