With Hurricane Mitch gathering force in the Atlantic, technical problems on Tuesday disabled a key weather satellite used to monitor atmospheric conditions over the eastern half of the United States.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates the nation's meteorological satellites, said the outage resulted in fewer weather data updates and the inability to monitor portions of the earth's atmosphere.
"We began experiencing [around 4 a.m. EST] conditions where [the satellite] started pointing away from the earth," said Jerry Dittberner, program manager of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES, system.
"It got its orbital and attitudinal electronics confused, so we put it in a 'safe-hold' mode while we try to figure out exactly what the problem is," Dittberner said.
Dittberner said the outage will have a minimal impact on those who rely on the bird's data.
Those users include NASA teams in Florida gearing up for the Thursday launch of the space shuttle that will carry Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio), and officials at the National Weather Service who are tracking Hurricane Mitch.
With the satellite offline, those groups will now get weather data updates every half hour rather than the standard 15 minutes, Dittberner said.
"It should have a minimal impact on the operations of the shuttle launch, because we can see way beyond Cape Canaveral."
The time frame for a return to operation depends on the exact root of the problem, Dittberner said.
"If we're lucky, maybe we can fix the problem tonight," he said. "If not, maybe we can see if we can get it to work tomorrow."
The satellite in question is one of two in the NOAA system, GOES-8. The GOES satellites provide data related to most of the atmosphere above the United States' longitudinal regions. Five satellites worldwide, some operated by Japan and Europe, provide total coverage of the earth's atmosphere.
Image data provided by a second GOES satellite, GOES-10, filled in for most, though not all, of the resulting gap in atmospheric coverage, NOAA said. Switched into "full disk" mode, the GOES-10 can view more of the earth than normal.
"We're able to cover about a third of what's left [by the outage]," Dittberner said.
The overlap of the second GOES satellite has enough to cover most of the critical US geographical areas normally handled by GOES-8. But if Hurricane Mitch were positioned further east, Dittberner said the outage may have introduced more problems for monitoring the high-powered hurricane. "We're fortunate that Mitch is as far west as it is."
Hurricane trackers feed data provided by GOES satellites into computer models to predict a storm's path. The same data provide nightly TV news images of cloud movement to meteorologists.
The agency said the technical problems don't appear to be the result of any impact with debris in space, such as the thousands of pieces of "space junk" that orbit the Earth. Rather, the electronics snafu indicates the problem may have been the result of the harsh electrical conditions of space.
"It's either a sensor failure or electronics failure in one of the computers," Dittberner said. Electrostatic discharges are common in space where charged particles are free to bombard manmade objects, unimpeded by the earth's protective atmosphere.
The GOES satellites went into orbit in 1994, and this is the first such problem for the system.
