America's New Super-Expensive Satellite Launches Today ...

Before it begins operations in geostationary space, GOES-R must safely get there.

United Launch Alliance

The Atlas V rocket carrying the GOES-R satellite moved to the launch pad on Friday.

Christmas is coming early for meteorologists. At 5:42pm ET Saturday, the United Launch Alliance will blast the GOES-R satellite into space for NOAA. This new instrument will provide real-time data and images to aid in the forecasting various types of weather, from hurricanes on Earth to solar storms. NASA TV will provide live coverage beginning at 5:10pm ET.

All manner of superlatives have been applied to this first of a new generation of weather satellites—fastest, best, clearest—in terms of data and images beamed back to Earth. Mission scientists say GOES-R bridges the divide from an era when most people got their weather information at 10 from a TV personality to when everyone carries a 10-day forecast in their pocket. Or, they say, it is like going from black-and-white television to high-definition.

Saturday's launch will be the first of four spacecraft in NOAA's GOES-R series, which is estimated to cost about $11 billion through 2035. The satellite will have three times the number of data channels as its most immediate predecessor, the GOES 15 that was launched in 2010 (GOES stands for "Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite"). The GOES-R improves every current GOES satellite product, while adding new information about lightning, smoke, fires, and volcanic ash, among other variables. The images it produces of weather systems on Earth will have four times the resolution of its predecessor. And with its new Advanced Baseline Imager, the satellite will have the capacity to scan major storm systems every 30 seconds and the entire western hemisphere five time faster.

For all of this, the delicate satellite must still make it safely into space before it can begin operations. We will find out Saturday—pending any weather and technical issues with the rocket—if that's the case. The GOES-R satellite will ride to space aboard an Atlas V 541 rocket, a variant that features four solid rocket boosters attached to a shared core.

Following the launch, the rocket's upper stage will power the satellite deeper into space, toward a geostationary orbit nearly 36,000km from Earth. It will take 14 days to reach. The satellite will then remain in a "checkout" orbit for about a year, during which time the instrument will be validated, before it finally moves into an operational, geosynchronous orbit.