Skip to main content

Check out the first hi-res images from NOAA’s new satellite

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has shared the first images from its recently deployed GOES-18 weather satellite.

The stunning captures (below) were obtained by the satellite’s Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument as it orbited about 22,000 miles above Earth.

Earth from Orbit: NOAA Debuts First Imagery from GOES-18

The ABI observes Earth via sixteen different channels. Each one detects energy at different wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling it to gather data on Earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans. According to NOAA, data from ABI’s channels can be combined to create imagery known as GeoColor, which looks similar to what the human eye would see from space. Analyzing the data in different ways enables meteorologists to highlight and examine various features of interest.

Recommended Videos

“The ABI provides high-resolution imagery and atmospheric measurements for short-term forecasts and severe weather warnings,” NOAA explains on its website. “ABI data is also used for detecting and monitoring environmental hazards such as wildfires, dust storms, volcanic eruptions, turbulence, and fog.”

GOES-18 is orbiting Earth at a location directly above the equator while moving at the speed as our planet turns. This allows NOAA’s new weather satellite to constantly observe the same area of Earth to track weather conditions and hazards as they develop.

GOES-18, which launched from the Kennedy Space Center on March 1, is the third satellite in NOAA’s next-generation GOES-R series, and now operates alongside GOES-16 and GOES-17, which were deployed in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

NOAA’s new satellite is observing a huge area that includes the U.S. West Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and the Pacific Ocean.

As it continues to calibrate its systems as part of post-launch testing procedures, GOES-18 has already observed storms across east Texas that produced large hail, strong wind gusts, and tornadoes, as well as wildfires and strong winds that blew up dust in New Mexico. Thick fog in Chile and thunderstorms in the Yucatan and Florida were also observed.

NOAA said recently that the launch of its new GOES satellites “forever changed the world of environmental monitoring and hazard detection in the Western Hemisphere.”

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
See planets being born in new images from the Very Large Telescope
This composite image shows the MWC 758 planet-forming disc, located about 500 light-years away in the Taurus region, as seen with two different facilities. The yellow colour represents infrared observations obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The blue regions on the other hand correspond to observations performed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope to peer into the disks of matter from which exoplanets form, looking at more than 80 young stars to see which may have planets forming around them. This is the largest study to date on these planet-forming disks, which are often found within the same huge clouds of dust and gas that stars form within.

A total of 86 young stars were studied in three regions known to host star formation: Taurus and Chamaeleon I, each located around 600 light-years away, and Orion, a famous stellar nursery located around 1,600 light-years away. The researchers took images of the disks around the stars, looking at their structures for clues about how different types of planets can form.

Read more
Dramatic images show a large satellite tumbling toward Earth
ESA's ERS-2 satellite tumbling toward Earth.

An illustration of the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite. ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared remarkable images showing one of its satellites in what it describes as a “tumbling descent.”

Read more
Check out these cool Earth images from the latest moon mission
Earth as seen from Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander as it heads to the moon.

Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander captures an image high over Australia as it heads toward the moon. There's much debate as to whether the dot to the left of Earth is the second-stage booster (which is seen more clearly in the first of the four images) or the moon, or something else. Intuitive Machines

Soon after SpaceX successfully launched Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander toward the moon last Thursday, the spacecraft snapped some extraordinary images of Earth.

Read more