Engineers developed workarounds that allow GOES-17’s Advanced Baseline Imager to provide more than 97% of its expected data.
A report released 2019-08-01 concluded that a problem with an instrument on the GOES-17 weather satellite is likely caused by some kind of blockage in a system used to cool the instrument.
NOAA considers GOES-17 to provide faster, more accurate, and more detailed observations than previous generations of geostationary orbit weather satellites.
GOES-17 was launched in March 2018 as GOES-S.
NOAA operated the GOES-17 ABI at 60 kelvin and adjusted detector channels to operate as high as the low 80s kelvin to lower cooling requirements.
GOES-16 and GOES-17 provide two next-generation geostationary satellites with comparable performance for NOAA.
NOAA, working with industry and international partners, mitigated problems with GOES-17’s Advanced Baseline Imager and obtained 97 percent of the data originally sought.
NOAA launched GOES-17 in 2018.
NOAA launched Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-17 (GOES-17) in 2018 with four space weather instruments.
GOES-T was slated to launch in 2020 with the same sensors as GOES-16 and GOES-17 before NASA discovered problems with the Advanced Baseline Imager’s cooling system.
Lockheed Martin finished assembling the GOES-T spacecraft in 2019 and was preparing it for environmental testing when NOAA directed the company to halt work due to ABI problems on GOES-17.
During on-orbit checkout of GOES-17, NOAA discovered that ABI’s infrared channels were not working as designed because of cooling problems.
The loop heat pipes for GOES-17’s ABI were built by ATK for Exelis, and those loop heat pipes were unable to adequately cool the imager’s infrared and near-infrared channels for approximately 12 hours per day.
GOES-17 launched in March 2018.
GOES-17’s ABI is expected to deliver about 97 percent of the data it was built to collect.
The modified ABI loop heat pipe design uses ammonia as the coolant rather than the propylene coolant used on GOES-17’s ABI.
A cooling problem degraded the performance of GOES-17’s ABI infrared channels, preventing them from operating during parts of each orbit.
NOAA plans to put GOES-17 into operational service late in 2018 at the GOES-West orbital slot at 135 degrees west.
NASA and NOAA established a mishap investigation board to probe an anomaly with the Advanced Baseline Imager instrument on the GOES-17 weather satellite launched in March 2018.
NOAA first identified a problem with the Advanced Baseline Imager on GOES-17 on 2018-05-23.