So when researchers announced last week that the population there has recovered not to 15,000 gray seals, the previous official estimate, but to as many as 50,000, it was dramatic evidence of how quickly conservation can sometimes work.īut the researchers, writing in the journal BioScience, weren’t just interested in the seals. GOES-T, which will become GOES-18 once it reaches orbit, will join GOES-16, which was launched in 2016 and is serving as the GOES-East satellite.As recently as the 1980s, gray seals were effectively extinct on Cape Cod. The new spacecraft will replace GOES-17, which is currently serving as GOES-West. Together, GOES East and West cover much of the Western Hemisphere, from New Zealand to the western coast of Africa. GOES-17 will become a standby satellite once GOES-18 is active the new satellite is expected to operate until about 2030. GOES-T will carry largely the same array of technology as previous GOES-R satellites, but its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the main weather imaging system on the satellite, includes an upgraded cooling system. The ABI on GOES-17 glitched shortly after its launch in 2018 and does not work properly when it is directly facing the sun, which happens at times during the spring and fall. The new satellite will also have an improved magnetometer, which can detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field. Along with other instruments on the satellite, the magnetometer will help detect space weather, which can cause power, communications and navigational outages on Earth. Space weather is expected to strengthen as the sun reaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle around 2025.ĭata from GOES satellites' ABI instruments enables reliable weather forecasting, severe storm warnings and hurricane tracking. The satellites also carry a lightning tracker, which helps accurately forecast thunderstorm, hail and tornadoes. Earth from space: The amazing photos by the GOES-16 satellite Powerful Landsat 9 satellite beams home 1st photos of Earth Along with being a crucial source of weather data, GOES satellites collect a wide variety Earth observations, including information on the atmosphere and oceans. "More and more, we find we're able to use the imager, for example, to help us detect and fight wildfires, because it's so much more sensitive than the previous imager," Yoe told. He said the lightning mapper even detected a meteor that burned up over Pittsburgh on New Years' Day, even though the system wasn't designed to detect meteors. "We're still learning all the time how to use these instruments," he said. The satellites will also be an important tool in continuing to monitor global climate change, from tracking changes in Earth's clouds to observing the impacts of climate change on Earth's surface, like changes in vegetation and wildfire frequency. Although NOAA is already developing the next-generation satellites that will follow, like the Geostationary Extended Observations ( GeoXO) satellites, the GOES-R satellites still carry advanced instruments that offer ever-expanding contributions to weather forecasting and climate science. "What we have right now is really, truly advanced and state of the art," said Yoe.Some users find that their computer background images are important. Satellite Eyes for Mac, which automatically changes the background image to a map of the user's current location, is an interesting personalization option for Mac.Īvailable as a freeware program, Satellite Eyes requires no payments to unlock its full functioning. The program downloaded and installed easily, with no interaction required by the user. Upon startup, the program prompts the user to enable the computer's location settings. It would have been a nice feature if the program took the user to that menu automatically, but it did not. Once this was complete, the background image automatically changed to an aerial map of our location. Several welcome options allowed different sources to be used for the image. Options also existed to change the look of the photo, including adding pixelization and other graphics. When the user changes location, the program can relocate the proper image either manually, or automatically. Technical support was not available, but the program did not have any bugs that presented themselves during our testing, and overall, the setup process was straightforward.
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