CONTACT: Patricia Viets FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Stephanie Kenitzer 8/20/96
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it began a two-week period of special operations today to try to prolong the life of instruments on the GOES-9 weather satellite, which overlooks the West Coast and out into the Pacific Ocean.
"GOES-9 is operating as it should, but has lost a backup motor on the imager," said Gary Davis, NOAA's director of satellite operations. "The problem has been proven to be caused by heat."
By changing the spacecraft orientation and pointing the imager away from the sun periodically, the maximum temperature swing can be reduced by up to 10 degrees Celsius. "We expect this to have a positive effect on prolonging the life of the instruments," Davis said.
The procedure will mean no images from GOES-9 for a period of about six hours every day during the two-week period, centered around 0900 GMT (midnight local time, 5:00 a.m. EDT). During the two weeks, NOAA will evaluate results and look at options such as use of other data during the imager's downtime. If results are positive, the outages will be implemented in August, October, February and April, when the instrument runs the hottest because of the relative position of the Earth and sun. This procedure will only affect 25 percent (or six hours per day) of the data during eight weeks of the year -- a data outage of less than 4 percent annually.
The evaluation procedure was worked out in consultation with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
NOAA's GOES-8 satellite, overlooking the East Coast and out into the Atlantic Ocean, will continue its normal operations. NOAA is currently planning to launch its next GOES satellite in the spring of 1997, with a redesigned motor to prevent a similar problem.