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You're about to get an inside look at the NOAA-N mission and find out what exciting things this mission will do for us.

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Our guests today include some of the major players responsible for the NOAA-N mission.

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First, NASA POES project manager, Karen Halterman, tells us how the critical POES program and this mission affects our daily lives.

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NOAA-N is a single satellite, but it's part of a constellation of satellites that

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are in the polar-orbiting system, and NOAA uses two of these satellites

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as their main operational satellites, and data from two of these satellites cover the entire globe of the whole earth at least four times a day.

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And that's enough data to be used in the environmental models that predict the weather.

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It's smaller than a school bus, but it's larger than a SUV. At launch, it weighs a little over 3000 pounds.

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Our satellites last for many years and we have several of them up there at any time.

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So that even if one of them fails before we launch the second one to replace it, there are older satellites that will still provide data.

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So we have much more coverage now than we used to. Another thing is resolution.

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We provide better resolutions than -- several resolutions and higher into the atmosphere than we did before.

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The better the resolutions, the more accurate your data is.

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And one of the advancements of the TIROS series started with NOAA-K which was launched in 1998 where we

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started flying more capable microwave instruments.

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And the microwave instruments are instruments that measure temperature and moisture content of the atmosphere.

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And they're very, very useful because they can see through the clouds.

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We also have some infrared instruments that provide good data, but they cannot see through the clouds.

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And since a lot of the Earth is covered by clouds,

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the microwave instruments have proven to be wonderful workhorse and a new addition to the meteorological family.

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AVHR instrument measures two different temperatures. And the El Nino phenomenon is increased in the temperatures of the Pacific Ocean.

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Well, since we've been flying this series since the late 70s, we have this nice climate database and have been able to see all the temperatures in the

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Pacific through the years. So you do have this wonderful database that you can go back and look for trends.

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The AVHR is used for fire detection, but it's on a larger scale. It certainly has mapped the terrible wildfires that have occurred

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in the western U.S. You also can see burning in the Amazon regions from the AVHR. It's also useful for smoke.

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It can detect smoke from volcanoes or smoke from fires. It's also useful for that as well.

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The AVHR is also useful for vegetation detection. It can detect how healthy plant growth is.

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And if you compare year to year, you can correlate certain drought conditions from the moisture contents.

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We also have the search and rescue payload, which is really not a science instrument the way the instruments are that collect temperature and moisture

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data. The search and rescue instruments are used to listen to emergency distress beacons that are set off by people on Earth.

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Aviators and mariners, people with personal beacons that might be hiking in the Himalayas;

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if you're in distress, you set off one of these beacons and then our satellites will pick up the beacon

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and relay that information to an emergency coordination center and they dispatch their craft or boats to go out and help you.

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Thank you, Karen.

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