BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: Coming up, we'll be joined by Andre' Dress of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
He's going to explain the science and technology involved in the GOES-N mission. But first, Andre' and three other principal players
on the GOES project recently shared their personal and professional thoughts about working on this mission.
Working on GOES is very much a team effort between NASA, NOAA and industry, and we've got lots of people that for GOES-N
have been working on the order of eight years to put the specs together and build the satellite and the instruments.
Some people nickname it the "eye in the sky" or a "hurricane hunter," so it's, you know, conscious, always 24/7,
doing the job or looking for severe weather and where hurricanes are. GOES will be able to know within meters, almost instantly,
where you are when you're lost and in distress, and if we can get to you within that first hour, your chances of survival
go kind of astronomically up. So that's a big improvement for the search and rescue system in total, because today,
GOES basically can just say, yeah you're lost somewhere out there in our field of view. But if you have that GPS system,
GOES is going to become much more important to saving your life because we'll get your signal instantly, and we won't have to wait
for the polar orbiters to come across four, maybe four to six hours later to pick up your signal. GOES is absolutely essential
for forecasting, because it's the only source of information we have that gives us the rapid updates that we need to see
the rapidly changing situations, such as rapidly growing thunderstorms or rapid changes in the course of a hurricane.
It's critical to have that rapid update and GOES, being a geostationary satellite, is the only source that we have to provide that.
GOES is the only data source that provides fast enough information, that covers a wide enough area at sufficient resolution,
to cover phenomena such as thunderstorm growth, hurricanes, and also the visibility, sources of poor visibility for aviation
such as fog and smoke. We manage startrackers, which are cameras that look out into the skies, lock on stars, okay,
and with that information, we can now tell how accurately this instrument is pointing, and with that knowledge we now know
how accurately the storms are moving on the Earth's surface. Everybody's seen the huge hurricanes coming across the Atlantic,
tracing across the Atlantic and wondering where they're going to hit, if they're going to hit, and as they get closer and closer
to the United States, the accuracy in that information that's coming from the GOES weather satellite is extremely
important to those people on the land, of telling them if they have to leave, if they don't have to leave. If we didn't have GOES,
that information wouldn't be there. These people would be blind. The storms would virtually be upon them before they even knew it.
I can think back to when I was a child, and my grandparents always saying, "Well, the possibility of knowing that is about the
same chances of predicting the weather." Well, that's no longer true. GOES is it. GOES has the ability to predict the weather,
and we know for sure when it's coming and can tell you accurately where it's going to hit the Earth. And that is very
important to this country. The imager provides actual photos that you see on the daily weather forecast. It takes pictures
of the Earth and it takes pictures of cloud covers and hurricanes and tornadoes. The solar X-ray imager monitors the Sun, provides
a visual image of the Sun itself. It's there to monitor the solar flares, the Sun spots and chromo-mass ejections,
which are energized particles thrown off by the Sun. These energetic particles come in waves, and when they hit the Earth
they can disrupt communications. They can take out satellites, destroy satellites' operation. They're also a risk to
astronauts that may be in orbit because it's a very intense radiation field that comes from this solar mass ejections.
This is something that affects people in daily life. I mean, when I turn on the weather forecast and see pictures of storm systems,
I say, "Hey, that's our satellites taking those pictures." And when they, when they talk about the fact that, you know,
lives have been saved and property saved, it's just a very heartwarming thing for me. I find it very exciting.