GOES-U Mission: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launches NOAA's Weather Satellite To Orbit

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA)'s GOES-U weather satellite, lifted off at 2126 UTC(June 25) from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

About eight minutes after liftoff, Falcon Heavy's two reusable side boosters returned to Earth, touching down at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, next door to KSC.

"I could feel the adrenaline go through when it started launching. It was incredible," Dakota Smith, satellite analyst and communicator at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), said after watching his first-ever launch. "GOES has been a huge part of my career and my passion and my hobby and to see a satellite go up and know that we're going to continue to get amazing imagery and I'm going to continue to work on this mission, it means a lot to me. I'm blown away."

GOES-U is the fourth and final satellite in NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) -R Series, the Western Hemisphere’s most sophisticated weather-observing and environmental monitoring system.  GOES-U's three sibling satellites previoulsy launched atop United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket, which unlike Falcon Heavy, is not reusable.

About 5 hours after launch, Falcon Heavy's upper stage will have deployed GOES-U into geostationary orbit, 35,785 kilometers above Earth. At that point, the satellite will be renamed GOES-19.

Mission control team members will put GOES-19 and its instruments through an extended series of checkouts, after which the satellite will take the place of GOES-16, which launched in November 2016 and currently occupies the GOES East position in the satellite network.

"After launch, there's a period of time where we get the orbit stabilized and then we turn on all of the sensors; we call that first light and expect it in about two months," Rick Spinrad, NOAA Administrator, reportedly said shortly before the June 25's launch. "Then, we go through the process of swapping out with GOES East that's currently operational, and that will probably happen around April of 2025. At that point, we'll be fully up and running, and the replaced satellite will effectively go on the storage orbit to be used as a backup."

GOES-19 will watch over a big portion of the Western Hemisphere with its five science instruments. It will also play a large role in monitoring and studying space weather using its new compact chronograph instrument (CCOR-1), which was developed by the Naval Research Lab.

"Basically, what it does is, it takes an image of the sun as if it were eclipsed every 30 minutes and gives us an image and a forewarning if something is headed our way," Jim Spann, a senior scientist at NOAA's Office of Space Weather Operations, reportedly said. "This is a new product from an operational perspective. We've had a coronagraph flying since the mid '90s on the ESA [European Space Agency]/NASA SOHO mission, which was a science mission, and it has done a fabulous job. But it is well beyond its years, and so to create a sustainable long-term operational capability, we are flying this compact coronagraph."

The operational lifetime of the current GOES-R series will extend into the 2030s. Its successor will be the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite system, the first member of which is set to launch in 2032.

GOES-U launch comes after concerns the weather would not cooperate, however a perfect window of opportunity opened for the June 25 liftoff from Florida.

WATCH Falcon Heavy launch of GOES-U satellite