Bolt from the Blue

Check out the description of a real world situation below, shared by the American Society of Engineering Education’s publication “Prism” Summer 2020 issue. How will these satellites help humans? What types of engineers had to come together to make this happen?

“For more than 40 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has relied on a network of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) to help forecast weather and track storms. But NOAA is halfway through a plan to assemble and launch a $10.8 billion fleet of new-generation satellites that will give it – and NASA – much greater ability to understand and forecast the increasing number of severe storms that climate change is expected to generate, according to Wired. The four, 6,000-pound satellites, built by engineers at Lockheed Martin, carry multiple instruments that can monitor such things as plumes of volcanic ash, space weather, and lightning – a bellwether for upcoming storms, the magazine notes. The first two of the satellites were launched in 2016and 2018. Together they can monitor every single lightning strike across the Western Hemisphere, and they’ve given scientists a new understanding of the phenomenon. A bolt of lightning can materialize and then strike the ground hundreds of miles away – a much greater distance than previously known. The last two GOES birds will launch next year and in 2024. Once aloft, the new satellites should vastly increase the ability to predict and track megastorms.”