NOAA, NASA space weather missions launching Wednesday start new era in solar storm forecasting
The Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 satellite will help improve the forecasts the NOAA's SWPC puts out, and eventually contribute to changes in space weather warnings for industries impacted by solar storms including the U.S. power grid, GPS, radio and satellite operators.
NOAA launching first dedicated space weather satellite
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center Service Coordinator Shawn Dahl joins FOX Weather to talk about the upcoming launch of a new satellite to help space weather forecasting. The Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) satellite launches in September and will be the first dedicated space weather spacecraft for NOAA.
SpaceX is set to launch a triple ride-sharing mission for NOAA and NASA, kicking off a major upgrade to space weather forecasting and research into influences from the Sun.
A Falcon 9 rocket is poised for liftoff on Wednesday at 7:30 a.m. ET from Florida launching NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) satellites and NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory.
The NOAA satellite marks the first dedicated space weather forecasting spacecraft in its fleet.
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"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.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with NASA’s IMAP, the agency’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA's Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) spacecraft stands vertical at Launch Complex 39A as the sun rises on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025, at the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(SpaceX / FOX Weather)
SWFO-L1 has a suite of instruments to do its job: a Solar Wind Plasma Sensor 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).
All this data will help improve the forecasts the SWPC puts out, and eventually contribute to changes in space weather warnings for industries impacted by solar storms.
In weather forecasting on Earth, NOAA and the National Weather Service have scales for all kinds of terrestrial weather. The Fujita Scale for tornadoes, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale and the NWS Storm Prediction Center has a 5-level scale for severe weather forecasting.
This image shows a massive solar flare exploding from the Sun on Tuesday, May 14, 2024.
(@NASASun/X / NASA)
However, space weather is less defined. Influences from the Sun can have negative impacts on GPS, the electrical grid, aviation, satellites and radio, which all take place in different spaces within our world.
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"There’s no one size fits all solution," said Scott McIntosh, Vice President of Space Operations at Lynker Space.
Lynker Space is the NOAA contractor working with the Space Weather Prediction Center to make space weather forecasts easier to understand and more usable for operators across those impacted systems, starting with the U.S. power grid.
"We're getting to the point now with space weather, where we need to take some bold steps," McIntosh said. "What we are doing with Lynker space is trying to find pathways for research, models to become operationally useful or useful for the end user on a much more accelerated timescale."
McIntosh said revamping the space weather scales is the first step toward helping power suppliers prepare for things like induced currents over a period of hours and prepare new protocols to address an incoming solar storm.
"You have to figure out some new warning or alert system which steps away from those old scales because the scales aren’t registering with them," McIntosh said.
McIntosh said the data pipeline will become infinitely more robust with these new satellite launches.
BAE Personnel inspects fully assembled SWFO-L1 observatory.
(BAE Space & Mission Systems / FOX Weather)
Positioned 1 million miles from Earth at Lagrange Point 1, IMAP will use 10 instruments to measure the heliosphere’s outer boundary every 15 seconds.
There are some similarities between the instrumentation on IMAP and SWOFL-L1, but IMAP is a NASA research satellite, versus NOAA’s first functional satellite dedicated to space 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.