Scott Nicholas
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has unveiled the first image taken by a Harris-built high-resolution digital camera onboard a weather monitoring satellite.
Harris said Monday its Advanced Baseline Imager took a picture of Earth’s full western hemisphere with detailed cloud and water features from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16.
NASA and NOAA launched the Lockheed Martin-built GOES-16R satellite atop a United Launch Alliance-built Atlas V rocket in November 2016.
The satellite carried the Harris ABI technology and payloads from Lockheed, Assurance Technology and the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
“Once the satellite is fully operational, the resolution of the imagery taken from the Harris ABI will be comparable to seeing a quarter from a mile away,” said Eric Webster, vice president and general manager of Harris’ environmental solutions business.
GOES-16’s imager system is designed to capture images at a resolution capacity of up to one-tenth of a square mile and gather data on clouds, dust, fires, hurricane intensity, rainfall rate, volcanic ash and winds.
Harris noted that the company’s ground system works to process and deliver nearly 1.75 terabytes of data per day to the National Weather Service and other weather information users.
