Finally Some Good Satellite News!

This year was a bad year for weather satellites. First, the Glory mission literally went up in flames on the launchpad due to federal contractor incompetence. Not only did the scew-ups at Orbital Sciences Corp. destroy a $400 million satellite, they did it in the exact same way that they destroyed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in 2009. Why these yokels got even one more contract and were allowed to flush even one more weather satellite down the toilet eludes me. There are no plans to replace Glory, leaving a gaping hole in observations of aerosols and solar radiation that are sorely needed for monitoring and studying climate and climate change, and all the scientists who had planned research and applied for grants around Glory were left the lurchiest of lurches. I personally know scientists who were brought to tears at the news of the explosion following launch.

Then the news came this week that hackers had briefly gained access of Landsat and Terra several years ago. Much of the commentary has focused on the damage that could be done if hackers were able to access more "sensitive" satellites, like those guiding military operations or handling communications, but messing with weather satellites is just as sinister to me. Imagine someone taking out our geostationary satellites during an active hurricane season - we wouldn't be able to track storms or warn people in threatened communities until it was too late. Here on the West coast, satellite imagery is an extremely important tool in identifying winter storms because unlike the midwest, we don't have any radar coverage west of us, where the storms come from. Just ocean. Furthermore, what if someone made slight changes to our polar orbiters without anyone noticing? Data sets that are crucial to the study of climate change, air pollution, tropical rainfall, etc, would be contaminated and useless for years. Or they could just swing out of orbit and fall to Earth years before the end of their useful life, without plans in place to quickly replace them. (OK so my coworker Tyler, who is much more involved in satellites than I am corrected me here: The hackers did not actually gain control of the satellites, but did divert the incoming data. Polar orbiters are only controlled from one spot on Earth, but because their line of sight is constantly changing, they send data back to many points on Earth which what got hacked into. Basically, small chunks of data are missing. That's still not good.)

That's all pretty depressing, but like the title promises, there was a glimmer of hope today. The new NPP polar orbiter was launched today, and it got up into space in one piece (it was not launched with the aforementioned yokel's Taurus XL rocket, but rather a Delta II rocket made by United Launch Alliance/Boeing)! Not only is it taking measurements to back up and replace the MODIS satellites (Aqua and Terra) it is testing out new instruments, too, and is a proof-of-concept project for the upcoming Joint Polar Satellite System. JPSS is a cooperation between NOAA and NASA and is a revised project after the scrapping of a planned joint satellite project between NOAA and the Defense Department called NPOESS. The DoD gets to go it alone now with their Defense Weather Satellite System.

I'm looking forward to more successful launches of shiny, new satellites in the next decade and in the meantime - someone put some better security on those things!