NOAA’s low hanging problem–Part 4

Backstory The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requested an Independent Review Team (IRT) look at NOAA satellite programs for possible problems. The IRT came back with issues and recommendations in two reports: one in 2012 and one in 2013. Within the report, the IRT pushed forward the possibility of no sun-synchronous LEO NOAA satellites […]

Minotaur escapes the maze

Last Tuesday night, Orbital launched a Minotaur rocket with 29 cubesats aboard. It seems everything went well. But perhaps just showing different pictures of the Minotaur’s ascent will be of interest to you–images like the one above? So here you go–the Washington Post has them all nice and posted for you. This launch is also […]

NOAA’s low hanging problem–Part 3

The past few posts have been about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s “urgent” satellite need using the Independent Review Team’s (IRT) recommendation from the November 2013 report. In the last post, you were introduced to the systems status pages of satellite NOAA-16 in the hopes of showing you the satellite’s overall health. The only […]

NOAA’s low hanging problem–Part 2

I mentioned yesterday two sites had reported about the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) urgency to build a replacement satellite. This urgency was established in an Independent Review Team (IRT) report produced on November 8 of this year. I have a link to a copy of the IRT report here. But it probably wouldn’t hurt […]

NOAA’s low hanging problem — Part 1

SpacePolicyonline.com and The Weather Channel both posted stories last week about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “urgent” need for a new weather satellite. You can read the stories from both sites here and here. According to their posts, there is a projected satellite and data gap for sun-synchronous low earth orbiting (go here […]