GOES-U Launch

[Misaka]

The new GOES satellite GOES-U will be launched in about 30 minutes.
Also on board new coronagraph that will replace LASCO.

Livestream of the launch:

 

Edited Tuesday at 09:05 PM by Misaka

[Ingolf]

4 minutes ago, Misaka said:

The new GOES satellite GOES-U will be launched in about 30 minutes.
Also on board new coronagraph that will replace LASCO.

Livestream of the launch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4hh_fl7qvk

So exited for the new instruments. Thanks for sharing the link Misaka. I'll enjoy it now 😍☝️ 

[Captain Jiffy]

Awesome! How long until its in position and sending back data?

[Adrian Kobyłecki]

49 minutes ago, Captain Jiffy said:

Awesome! How long until its in position and sending back data?

No information has been provided but I guess less than a month, I hope you won't have to wait as long as for the Indian satellite

[chronical]

Is the other name for GOES-U GOES-19?

[Philalethes]

22 minutes ago, chronical said:

Is the other name for GOES-U GOES-19?

Yep; from the mission overview:

Quote

GOES-U will be renamed GOES-19 after it reaches geostationary orbit. Following a successful on-orbit checkout of its instruments and systems, NOAA plans to put GOES-19 into operational service, replacing GOES-16 as GOES East. GOES-19 will work in tandem with GOES-18, NOAA’s GOES West satellite.

It's gone alphabetically from GOES-R as GOES-16, constituting the GOES-R series, which is now complete, and which marks the end of the entire GOES series as a whole. The next series of satellites will apparently be GeoXO.

[hamateur 1953]

Was a totally cool thing to watch the separation live.   Thanks for posting it @Misaka 👍

[Justanerd]

Lots of new toys on board - can’t wait to see how it changes current standards!

[Philalethes]

4 hours ago, Justanerd said:

Lots of new toys on board - can’t wait to see how it changes current standards!

The coronagraph is definitely what I'm most excited about, can't wait until we get imagery from it.

There's a brief discussion about it at 5:31:30 in the stream Misaka linked to for anyone interested.

[Ingolf]

1 hour ago, Philalethes said:

The coronagraph is definitely what I'm most excited about, can't wait until we get imagery from it.

There's a brief discussion about it at 5:31:30 in the stream Misaka linked to for anyone interested.

What improvement do you expect? I mean how many years of technology is between both satellites... Could it be such a big step like Hubble and JWST? I'm so excited. 

[MinYoongi]

1 hour ago, Ingolf said:

What improvement do you expect? I mean how many years of technology is between both satellites... Could it be such a big step like Hubble and JWST? I'm so excited. 

The best change is not the imagery itself but the availability. 30 mins instead of 8-48h from Lasco.

[Philalethes]

2 hours ago, Ingolf said:

What improvement do you expect? I mean how many years of technology is between both satellites... Could it be such a big step like Hubble and JWST? I'm so excited. 

It's hard to say exactly, but there are at least a couple of factors that make me suspect it's going to be a big improvement.

One is what you mention, just the sheer amount of time since SOHO was launched with LASCO, almost 30 years at this point; during all that time I'm sure there's been a lot of time to go over the technology and find ways to make it better, although I guess there have been coronagraphs launched in the meanwhile too (like that of STA, and maybe there are others I don't know about too, I'd love to know).

The other is a point that I've seen emphasized here and there, which is that this is the first operational coronagraph, as opposed to the previous ones that have been loosely classified as research coronagraphs, the difference being that in this case the the instrument and mission is designed specifically to provide frequent and regular data, rather than the irregular and sometimes quite unreliable data from e.g. LASCO. In this article someone from the SWPC states:

Quote

"It will be the first near real time operational coronagraph that we have access to. That's a huge leap for us because up until now, we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago," Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), told Space.com on the phone. 

"So this is exciting because I'm not going to have to wait now for the data to be downloaded, because sometimes current coronagraph imagery is delayed. Sometimes we wait as long as four or eight hours, and every hour counts when you're dealing with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which sometimes come to Earth and give us big geomagnetic storms like we had last month."

But there are of course no guarantees. The instrument is called CCOR (Compact Coronagraph), and is based on the research version of it that is on STA, so at least I hope they've improved upon it and that we're not going to get the grainy imagery from that one, heh. This will be CCOR-1, with CCOR-2 going on SWFO-L1, with the two being "slightly different" as per NOAA, the main difference from what I've gathered being that CCOR-2 will have a somewhat larger FOV and noticeably lower spatial resolution than CCOR-1. You can check out the specs here under the CCOR tab. By comparison LASCO C2 and C3 have spatial resolutions of 23 arcsec and 112 arcsec respectively, so the resolution for both of these will be better than C3 but worse than C2. The FOVs for C2 and C3 are 1.5-6 R_☉ (Solar radii) and 3.7-30 R_☉ respectively, so the views of both of these will be more similar to C3, with neither of them having a view as close as C2 nor a view as far as C3.

All in all it doesn't seem like the specs are that different from previous coronagraphs, so maybe it's more a matter of having steady and reliable data, but maybe there have been improvements in imaging and so on too; we'll just have to wait and see until the first imagery rolls in!

Edited Wednesday at 11:31 PM by Philalethes
typo