NOAA is about to get its first dedicated space weather satellite - just in time
Space weather forecasters have received some help in the past few years. But NOAA hasn’t had a dedicated space weather forecasting satellite. That changes this fall with the launch of the Space Weather Follow On spacecraft.
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NOAA’s space weather forecasting toolbox is about to get a major upgrade this year with the launch of a spacecraft dedicated to helping forecast impacts from the Sun, which is no easy task to begin with.
"You're trying to forecast something from 93 million miles away, how impactful that would be when you have just a couple of satellites in between that whole vacuum of space," NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) Service Coordinator Shawn Dahl said.
Space weather forecasters have received some help in the past few years. Most recently, NASA’s TRACERS mission launched in July to study Earth’s magnetic field, which can help forecasters understand the impacts of space weather.
NOAA’s GOES satellites have space weather monitoring instruments. Its newest satellite, GOES-19, now GOES East, has a compact chronograph. This instrument continuously monitors the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, helping space weather forecasters see where extreme space weather events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections originate.
NOAA's GOES-18 satellite's Solar Ultraviolet Imager, or SUVI, recorded a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun in six wavelengths. The CME sent a tangle of plasma hurtling out into the atmosphere while some of it is sucked back up into the sun.
But this unique branch of forecasting is also relying on a few aging spacecraft.
Mission managers have been unable to contact the satellite DSCOVR, which measures solar wind a million miles from Earth. According to NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, the agency stopped receiving new data from DSCOVR as of July 15. NASA’s ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft, launched in 1997, is still sending back data. DSCOVR is a decade old and was designed to replace ACE.
That’s all to say that the timing of a new dedicated space weather satellite, the Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1), in the same orbit is perfect.
NOAA’s SWFO satellite will be in an orbit 1 million miles from Earth, known as Lagrange 1, the same orbit as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and DSCOVR. Unlike the GOES satellites, which are joint NASA and NOAA missions, SWFO is a mission solely dedicated to space weather forecasting.
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Dahl explains that having NOAA in charge of this spacecraft will come in handy.
"If they have to do maintenance on it, we can say, 'No, it's a critical space weather day, or we have something going on we need it,'" he said.
SWFO has a suite of instruments to do its job: a Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS) providing real-time measurements of plasma from the Sun, the SupraThermal Ion Sensor to help provide early warning of Coronal Mass Ejections and a magnetometer to measure different components of the magnetic field. Then there is a compact coronagraph.
Between the compact chronograph on GOES and SWFO, data will be coming in about every 7 minutes, crucial to forecasting impacts from coronal mass ejections (CME).
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"So speedier CMEs, that means a lot to us because some of these go very fast, and they get out of the field of view very quickly. That'll give us more pictures to analyze to do better CME analysis and thus better CME models for what might actually take place here at Earth," Dahl said.
With Solar Maximum soon in the rearview, SWPC forecasters are looking ahead to what these instruments could do for the next solar cycle. Last May saw the strongest solar storm in 20 years, known as the Gannon storm.
Public interest in space weather is also growing due to the impacts it can have on technology we use every day, including GPS, the power grid, air travel, but also the gorgeous phenomena known as the Northern lights. The Gannon solar storm brought a new interest in space weather. The SWPC hopes to continue with this momentum.
"That's an opportunity we just don't wanna let go. Because yeah, we do have periods of time where things get so quiet that people forget about these and they don't understand its relevance," Dahl said.
When does SWFO get to work?
SWFO arrived in Florida at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in July, where it is being prepared for launch. NASA and NOAA are targeting no earlier than Sept. 23 for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
BAE Personnel inspects fully assembled SWFO-L1 observatory. (BAE Space & Mission Systems / FOX Weather)
After launch, the spacecraft will spend about four months traveling to its final orbit 1 million miles from Earth, but some of the SWFO instruments will begin operating soon after launch, collecting valuable data during the journey.
"The beauty for us is we don't have to wait for it to get a million miles away at its orbital point, which will take some time," Dahl said. "We will start quickly, eventually getting solar wind and magnetic field information on those instrument packages."
SWFO should be fully operational by spring 2026.