University of Central Florida optics professor James Harvey and two graduate students designed the Solar X-ray Imager on board the GOES-N satellite scheduled to launch Wednesday from Cape Canaveral Air Station.
The GOES N-P satellites — a joint project between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — will help improve monitoring of weather activity such as hurricane formations and tornadoes.
The new X-ray telescope on board the GOES-N satellite will also allow NOAA to monitor and predict space weather, which can disrupt cell phones, cause blackouts, interrupt airline traffic and damage or destroy instruments on multimillion-dollar satellites.
The commercial and military communication satellites in orbit help residents and companies conduct day-to-day business. They are also critical to the military, which uses them to monitor and direct troop movements.
Harvey, an associate professor of optics, and students Patrick Thompson and Martina Atanassova developed the telescope design and provided detailed image analysis at CREOL, or the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers, in UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics.
The precision X-ray mirrors were fabricated at Goodrich Optical Systems in Danbury, Conn., and four flight models of the telescope were built by Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysical Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. Thompson is now working on space-based optical instruments at Johhs Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Atanassova is completing her post-doctoral work in Belgium. The new telescope design allows officials to take high-resolution X-ray images of the sun.
These images will show activity such as sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections — expulsion of large clusters of hot gas. The resulting expulsion of high-energy charged particles constitutes “space weather,” and can have a variety of detrimental effects on earth if aimed toward the planet. The combination of those high-energy charged particles and the earth’s magnetic field can lead to power grid overloads and blackouts.
Electromagnetic interference can cause communication failure, geomagnetic storms can lead to GPS malfunctions and radiation from expelled high-energy charged particles can pose health hazards to astronauts on the International Space Station. If space weather is severe enough, it also can cause satellites to deviate from their intended orbits.
The GOES N/O/P series of satellites is the next generation of weather satellites. The satellites will help monitor atmospheric, land and now space weather. The GOES-N satellite has been ready for about a year, but the launch has been delayed several times. The launch on a Boeing Delta IV rocket is scheduled Wednesday.
