The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series (GOES-R) is the next generation of geostationary weather satellites, and launched as GOES 16 on Nov. 19, 2016. The program is a collaborative development and acquisition effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). RSI has been involved with the design, implementation, testing and calibration since 2003. The GOES16 satellite provides continuous imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s Western Hemisphere and space weather monitoring. It is be the primary tool for the detection and tracking of hurricanes and severe weather and provide new and improved applications and products for fulfilling NOAA’s goals of Water and Weather, Climate, Commerce, and Ecosystem.
The satellite launched with six primary instruments. RSI has supported both the Global Lightning Monitor (GLM) and the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). From NASA, "The Advanced Baseline Imager is the primary instrument on GOES-R for imaging Earth’s weather, oceans and environment. ABI views the Earth with 16 different spectral bands (compared to five on past GOES), including two visible channels, four near-infrared channels, and ten infrared channels.
It provides three times more spectral information, four times the spatial resolution, and more than five times faster temporal coverage than the past system.ABI is a mission critical payload on GOES-R, providing more than 65 percent of all mission data products currently defined."
RSI provides subject matter expertise to the ABI flight project in detectors, calibration, and systems engineering. In addition, RSI has performed stray light modeling and contamination modeling for ABI.
For the GLM, "The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is a single-channel, near-infrared optical transient detector that can detect the momentary changes in an optical scene, indicating the presence of lightning. GLM will measure total lightning (in-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground) activity continuously over the Americas and adjacent ocean regions with near-uniform spatial resolution of approximately 10 km." RSI provides science and algorithm support to the GLM.
