The newest GOES weather satellite in NOAA's fleet is now fully operational (video)
The final satellite in NOAA's GOES-R weather satellite series has a new place in orbit … and a new name.
The GOES-19 weather satellite, which launched into orbit in June 2024, has officially taken the place of its predecessor GOES-16 to watch over the Western Hemisphere from its perch 22,236 miles (35,785 kilometers) above us. To mark the milestone, the satellite has the new name of GOES East to serve as the dominant geostationary satellite in the fleet, NOAA officials said in a statement.
"With GOES-19 now in operation, NOAA has delivered the full fleet of GOES-R satellites to orbit, providing the most sophisticated technology ever flown in space to help forecast weather on Earth," said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA's Satellite and Information Service, in the statement. "GOES-19 supports NOAA's mission to provide secure and timely access to global environmental data and information to promote and protect the nation's security, environment, economy and quality of life."
As GOES East, the satellite will be responsible for keeping a watchful eye on tropical development in the Atlantic Ocean, and monitor weather such as severe storms, wildfires, and atmospheric rivers. Just like its siblings, GOES-19 is equipped with technology to produce high-resolution imagery, take measurements of the atmosphere, and track the location and intensity of lightning in real-time.
If that's not exciting enough for scientists, this satellite also hosts NOAA's first compact coronagraph instrument (CCOR-1), monitoring the sun's activity.
"CCOR-1 is a game-changer for ensuring our nation is resilient to solar storms, monitoring massive eruptions of energy from the sun in real time," Clinton Wallace, director of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, said in the statement. "With dramatically improved resolution and faster detection, it helps us better predict dangerous space weather that can impact satellites, GPS, astronaut safety, aviation and power grids, ensuring we can protect critical technology and infrastructure like never before."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
10 hours ago
- Forbes
Legendary Hacker & Investor Pablos Holman's 1000x Deep Tech Future
Pablos Holman is a hacker, writ large. The first time he spoke for one of my events, in 2010, he captured an audience member's credit card information during a break and started making a purchase on stage. He didn't complete the purchase (or share the number), but he did make his point. When I'm puzzling over a truly far-out concept or epochal challenge, Holman is one of my go-to experts. He's spent his career hacking humanity's biggest challenges with organizations like Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures. His new book, Deep Future, is a field guide to transformative technology and paradigm-shattering thinking. Fellow Technologists: 'Aim Higher!' Holman calls himself a 'Possibilist'—the future can be better, if we decide to build it. That ethos threads the book and echoes a theme I've written about for years: technology as the art of the possible. To do this well requires reframing problems, escaping established paradigms, and doing the hard work of real invention. Deep Future draws a sharp line between 'shallow tech' and 'deep tech.' Shallow tech enhances convenience. He bluntly proposes, 'If somebody makes an iPhone app to have weed delivered to their dorm room using drones, do we really have to call that tech?' Deep tech expands human capability by orders of magnitude. Holman challenges us: stop chasing 1% gains. 'Deep Tech is about finding the breakthroughs that make it possible to do things 10x, 100x, 1,000x faster, cheaper or better.' Mosquitoes Meet Lasers If you know Pablos, you know about the mosquito-zapping laser invented at Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. The team took apart the malaria problem and tried something new: detect the wingbeat frequency—to distinguish it from other insects—of a female Anopheles in flight and shoot it down. 'We can, and will, eradicate malaria once and for all in our lifetimes. But not by reading the directions,' he the problem, prototype shamelessly and let physics do the heavy lifting. When the approach works—even once—you've expanded what's possible. The mosquito laser array wasn't intended to go to market. Many deep tech visions are. Read the book for dozens of compelling cases. Here are three. Deep Future relates the story of Holman's fund investing in Ladon Robotics, a company reenvisioning ocean-going shipping around autonomy and wind. Consider the economics: 'About five out of six dollars spent on a ship during its life is burned as fuel. This industry literally burns most of its operational expenditures.' Ladon's idea is deceptively simple: autonomous ships powered by wind, with sun-powered battery auxiliary propulsion for navigating harbors and periods with low winds. In other words, remove fuel from the costs. It's classic deep tech. It doesn't 'improve' shipping, it transforms it. Renewables stumble on intermittency and storage. Holman proposes to ensure the sun never sets on your solar farm. 'Put those solar panels on a rocket ship, blast them into space.' Orbital solar farms could intercept sunlight 24/7, receiving eight times as much energy as they would on the Earth's surface. The system could deliver electricity via radio waves to receiving antennas on the ground, 'even in the middle of the night or during a snowstorm.' A decade ago, this would have read like a comic book. Falling launch costs and mature RF beam-forming technologies make this increasingly feasible. Holman argues, 'All the technology to do this exists already. No breakthroughs necessary.' It's a plausible path to low-cost power—precisely the kind of paradigm flip deep tech is meant to deliver. While others have proposed such a solution, Holman's venture firm Deep Future has invested in Virtus Solis, a team endeavoring to make it happen. Some of the best solutions have been around for centuries. Consider concrete, civilization's foundation and one of our dirtiest materials. Holman highlights the work of MIT's Admir Masic, which helps explain why Ancient Rome's Pantheon still stands: lime clasts throughout Roman concrete act as self-healing reservoirs. 'When water seeps in, it activates the lime and fills the cracks. It is self-healing concrete that gets stronger with time.' Longer-lasting infrastructure with 10% - 50% lower lifecycle carbon emissions. With cement accounting for approximately 8% – 13% of global CO₂ emissions, this matters. Unlike most deep tech solutions, this one has thousands of years of proof behind it. Massive Thinking, Brutal Simplicity Holman's examples—mosquito lasers, autonomous shipping, space-based solar, self-healing concrete--exhibit how to see differently: select huge problems that matter, don't let current reality get in the way, discover opportunities the incumbents ignore. While Deep Future is about audacious thinking and enormously challenging technology, much of Holman's thinking illustrates a skill I call 'brutal simplicity.' It's an approach we can all use. Here are three questions to help you do so: The first question seeks clarity before seeking solutions. Do we really understand the problem? The second tests whether we have the right problem in mind. The third question challenges us to seek as simple--though not necessarily easy--a solution as possible. Consider one of Deep Future's examples. Problem: How can we generate clean, reliable electricity at scale? Blast solar panels into space and beam the power back to Earth. Eh, voila: Virtus Solis. Ignore The Boogeymen: Build Anyway Big ideas attract bigger anxieties. Holman devotes a chapter to our habit of telling 'boogeyman' stories about new tools—nuclear, psychedelics, AI, you name it. His advice? Research, experiment, invent—then regulate the real risks we discover. The future won't be built by the skeptics. It belongs to pragmatic optimists who make better stories true. While I wouldn't expect mosquito lasers at your next BBQ, you'll likely discover a lot of you-heard-it-here-firsts in Holman's book. Thanks to the Possibilists amongst us, some of these monstrously hard, brutally simple visions will one day become reality.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
This real 'Eye of Sauron' spits out ghost particles in space. Here's what it looks like
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. For about 15 years, a powerful radio telescope on planet Earth dutifully recorded data about a location in the cosmos billions of light-years away from us — and, at last, astronomers managed to stitch together those extensive observations to reveal a full picture of what this telescope has been looking at. It's … the Eye of Sauron! Well, sort of. Though the image you're seeing bears a striking resemblance to the jarring symbol associated with the main villain in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, it's actually something far more fear-inducing. At face value, at least. What you're looking at is actually a blazar, which requires a couple of layers to explain. Out in the universe, there are these things called quasars, which refer to the extremely luminous centers of active galaxies (meaning they emit a lot of electromagnetic radiation) that are powered by supermassive black holes. These galactic cores are called active galactic nuclei, or AGNs; and in fact, the monster black holes powering these phenomena can also funnel matter outward in the form of highly energetic jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light. It's all very intense. Quasars can be so bright that they outshine the collective light of every single star in the galaxy surrounding them. Blazars, on the other hand, are pretty much quasars — except with those supermassive-black-hole-rooted jets pointing within 10 degrees of our planet. That doesn't exactly mean we're about to be obliterated by a jet, though. Remember how I said the fear remains at face value? The only reason we're seeing the jet pointing straight toward us is because of our vantage point, and this doesn't necessarily increase its danger. Still, blazars, because of this serendipitous orientation, tend to appear even brighter than the already ridiculously bright quasars. Not that it matters, but Sauron would sure love them. "When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning," Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study and principal investigator of the Multi-messenger Studies of Extragalactic Super-colliders project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), said in a statement. "We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us." "This alignment causes a boost in brightness by a factor of 30 or more," explains Jack Livingston, a study co-author at MPIfR. "At the same time, the jet appears to move slowly due to projection effects — a classic optical illusion." And this particular blazar could be the one blazar to rule them all. Scientists have formed a clear image of it using observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (named PKS 1424+240), and it may very well be one of the brightest sources of high-energy gamma rays and cosmic neutrinos ever observed. Neutrinos are mind-blowing items themselves, while we're at it. They're nicknamed "ghost particles" because they're invisible, zippy bits that penetrate the entirety of our cosmos yet remain tremendously difficult to detect. Trillions of these particles are flowing through your body as you read this, but you can't tell because they don't interact with any of the particles that make up your body. They slide right through. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole, specifically built to pin down neutrinos, is actually the institution that discovered PKS 1424+240 in the first place because of its super high neutrino emission levels. Solving this puzzle confirms that active galactic nuclei with supermassive black holes are not only powerful accelerators of electrons, but also of protons — the origin of the observed high-energy neutrinos," concludes Kovalev. Reconstructing the spectacular blazar, according to the discovery team, also allows astronomers to peer directly into the "heart" of this jet — and that could be great news for scientists trying to understand the dynamics of these awesome objects. Kovalev explains that it confirms AGNs with supermassive black holes don't only accelerate electrons (negatively charged particles that make up atoms) but also protons. This is a big find, the researcher explains, because that explains the origin of the high-energy neutrinos PKS 1424+240 appears to be spitting out. A study about these results was published on Tuesday (Aug. 12) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
Popular weight-loss drugs linked to sudden vision loss, research suggests
New research has discovered certain weight-loss medications could be associated with an increased risk of serious eye conditions, and even vision loss. Two studies, published in JAMA, analyzed how semaglutide and tirzepatide — which include popular drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound — impacted eye health in Americans with type 2 diabetes over a two-year period. One study found a modest risk of developing non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy (NAOIN) – a rare eye condition that can lead to sudden vision loss due to lack of blood flow – in association with semaglutide and tirzepatide. Popular Weight-loss Medication Could Relieve Painful Arthritis Symptoms, Doctors Report Out of more than 159,000 study participants with type 2 diabetes, 35 developed NAION, compared to 19 people in the comparison group. The Ohio-based researchers also noted an increased risk of developing "other optic nerve disorders," identified in 93 patients. Read On The Fox News App Although the second study did not observe a "statistically significant difference" in NAION in GLP-1 drug users, there was a small increase in diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease that can damage the retina. Diabetic Patients Taking Glp-1s May Face Increased Risk Of Eye Disease, Study Suggests While individuals with type 2 diabetes on GLP-1s showed a modestly increased risk of diabetic retinopathy, the researchers concluded that fewer patients experienced sight-threatening complications from the disease. "These findings suggest that all patients with type 2 diabetes treated with GLP-1 RAs, regardless of preexisting diabetic retinopathy, should be regularly screened and monitored for potential complications," the study authors concluded. Sue Decotiis, M.D., a medical weight loss doctor in New York City, said she believes more studies are required to confirm the association between these drugs and vision loss, as these studies report some conflicting results. "NAION is a rare condition of the optic nerve that, although serious, has not really been shown to be increased by these studies," Decotiis, who was not involved in the research, told Fox News Digital. "We need more studies for certain." Diabetic patients already face a high incidence of eye disease related to blood flow and nerve damage, the expert noted. "Eye complications are often directly related to the degree or lack thereof of diabetes control." Click Here To Sign Up For Our Health Newsletter In most cases, GLP-1 drugs reduce the severity of type 2 diabetes, therefore reducing the incidence of eye diseases, Decotiis noted. These drugs have also been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, and to improve circulation, which can improve eye health. For diabetics who are starting a GLP-1, Decotiis recommends having an exam done by an ophthalmologist and scheduling follow-up exams throughout treatment. "We should take precaution with methodical ophthalmic care for diabetics on these drugs," Decotiis said. "However, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water." For more Health articles, visit Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, provided the following statement when contacted by Fox News Digital. "Patient safety is a top priority for Novo Nordisk, and we take all reports about adverse events from the use of our medicines very seriously. NAION is a very rare eye disease, and it is not an adverse drug reaction for the marketed formulations of semaglutide (Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy) as per the approved labels in the U.S." "Novo Nordisk, on its part, has conducted an analysis across randomized controlled clinical trials with GLP-1 receptor agonists, including a blinded ophthalmologist evaluation to confirm NAION diagnoses. Our current assessment is that these data do not suggest a causal relationship between GLP-1 RA use and NAION events."Original article source: Popular weight-loss drugs linked to sudden vision loss, research suggests Solve the daily Crossword
