The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has selected Lockheed Martin to build a spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program. The contract with NOAA is valued at $2.27 billion and will include the development of three spacecrafts as well as four options for additional spacecrafts, according to a press release about the announcement (1).
The Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) program will observe earth from geostationary orbit, replacing the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites - R Series (GOES-R) system in the early 2030s, the end of its operational lifespan (2). GEoXO will expand on GOES-R’s visible and infrared imagery, and its lightning mapping capabilities (2). The new satellite system will also include hyperspectral sounding, atmospheric composition, and ocean color observations (2).
"Our team is excited and ready to move forward to design and field this critical national capability," said Kyle Griffin, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space at Lockheed Martin in a press release (3). "Our GeoXO design draws heavily from what we've learned with GOES-R spacecraft over the last 15 years, while incorporating new, digital technologies not only onboard the vehicles but in the design and development of this powerful, weather-monitoring platform of the future."
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The scope of the contract with NASA includes the design, analysis, development, fabrication, testing, evaluation, and support launch of the GeoXO satellites, according to the press release. Lockheed Martin will also provide engineering development units, and supply and maintain the equipment and simulators at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Maryland (1).
The information supplied by the GeoXO satellite system will help address challenges including changing weather, climate, and the ocean, according to NOAA. Data from the system will help develop weather forecast models, including severe weather warnings and short-term forecasts. It will also be able to detect wildfires, smoke, dust, volcanic ash, flooding, and drought (1).
Lockheed Martin has worked closely with NASA and other space agencies on the development of satellites. Last year, the company announced a $816 million contract with the Space Development Agency tobuild 36 Tranche 2 Transport Layer (T2TL) beta satellites (4). T2TL is part of an overarching plan to build more resilient space architectures for beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) targeting, data transport, and advanced missile detection and tracking.
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Spectroscopic technology has historically played a significant role in the development of satellites and other technologies. The GeoXO, for example, will contain an atmospheric composition instrument (ACX), essentially a hyperspectral spectrometer that measures a wide spectrum of light from ultraviolet (UV) to visible. The tool will provide hourly observations of air pollutants emitted into the atmosphere by transportation, power generation, industry, oil and gas extraction, wildfires, and volcanoes. In May, NASA announced that BAE Systems would manufacture the ACX system.
References
New Spectroscopic Techniques Offer Breakthrough in Analyzing Ancient Chinese Wall Paintings
October 29th 2024This new study examines how spectroscopic techniques, such as attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR FT-IR), ultraviolet–visible–near-infrared (UV-Vis-NIR) spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy, were used to analyze the pigments in ancient Chinese wall paintings.
Geographical Traceability of Millet by Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy and Feature Extraction
October 18th 2024The study developed an effective mid-infrared spectroscopic identification model, combining principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machine (SVM), to accurately determine the geographical origin of five types of millet with a recognition accuracy of up to 99.2% for the training set and 98.3% for the prediction set.