While its primary mission is weather, GOES has also
observed significant environmental conditions such as these
fires burning in Montana/Idaho/Wyoming on July 27, 2000.
GOES-M SPACECRAFT
The last of this series of Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellite (GOES), GOES-M will be renamed GOES-12
once in orbit. Housing a new instrument to watch for dangerous
space weather, GOES-M will be placed in standby spot and
activated when needed to replace the GOES-8, 10 or 11
spacecraft. It will fly in a geostationary orbit, meaning that
it rotates with the Earth to remain in the same spot over the
U.S.
The fifth in the series, GOES-M is carrying the Solar X-ray
Imager (SXI) to test it for future missions. The instrument
will monitor space weather (solar flares, solar active
regions, coronal holes and coronal mass ejections ) to
determine when to issue warnings for ground and space systems.
GOES satellites are also key in monitoring volcanoes, forest
fires, thunderstorms, rainfall, tornadoes and hurricanes.
Many NASA researchers are looking to "sensor
webs" as a cost-effective new way to study Earth and its
climate. The technology would link various satellites together
to gather data together, then analyze the many perspectives.
The proposed "webs" would include land surface
imagers, cloud and water vapor imagers and other systems.
BLUE MARBLE
This high-quality depiction features Hurricane Linda off
the west coast of North America, sediments around the mouth of
the Amazon River and the shallow waters of the Caribbean.
Heavy vegetation is represented as green, while sparse
vegetation is shown in yellow. GOES and SeaWiFS data were used
to create this data-driven image.
