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#goes — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #goes, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Geostationary Eclipse Season

    As we head towards the autumn equinox, the angle between the plane of the ecliptic and the Earth's equatorial plane causes the Sun, Earth, and geostationary satellites to align.

    During this period - which occurs for about 45 days around both the spring and autumn equinoxes - geostationary satellites pass directly through the Earth's shadow once every 24 hours. These eclipses can last up to 72 minutes around the exact date of the equinox, temporarily blocking the solar panels that power the spacecraft and forcing them to rely entirely on onboard batteries to maintain operations.

    The GOES 18 and 19 sun sensors become periodically blocked by the Earth during eclipses, preventing data collection. For this reason, you'll be seeing breaks in the data on the charts in the Space Weather Ops dashboard like these for about the next six to seven weeks.

    #spaceweather
    #goes
    #noaa
    #g7izu