This is another must read for aurora folks, because you will learn everything you need to know about the lives of the US satellites that have been bringing us space weather, have died in the line of service (RIP DISCOVR) and are about to be online.
This is the main takeaway information you are about to digest:
- The coronagraph (CCOR-2) aimed at producing images of the solar corona with low latency: those images will reach forecasters in under ~30 minutes, which is much faster than many older systems.
If you came to Space School, you heard me talking about Lagrange 1 and the SWFO-L1 launch. If you have been around here for very long, you’ve also heard me managing expectations in terms of WHEN we can accurately and affirmatively say “the aurora is about to be here.” One hour, right? That’s the distance from ACE to us. Well, guess what, all that is about to change.
NASA and NOAA don’t launch satellites specifically for people like me to tell everyone to go look at auroras. The point of this new satellite is not exploration, but operation- meaning, it’s going up there to monitor space weather events that may impact defense communications or the power grid.
I’m not sure how much of this information is going to dutifully feed into a Real Time monitor like the DISCOVR Real Time Solar Wind data plot, now being populated from ACE data. The other aspect of this is, for the next four months, while that deal is headed to Lagrange-1, the only operational satellite we have right now is ACE. And, ACE is legacy equipment and does go down from time to time.
It does make life interesting when ACE goes down, because then I am relying on webcams around the globe, pictures people post over at Glendale, and the like. And, this time of year, while SWFO is making the voyage, is generally a rather busy time for us. So it could get interesting. At any rate, I’ll stop yacking and post this link for your morning coffee read: