NOAA Satellite Operations

0:11	[Kathy] The nation runs on NOAA satellites
0:13	[Keith] Doing satellite operations is not as easy as just pushing a button on a keyboard.
0:19	[Al] We have a lot of data coming in; a lot of data going out…used a whole lot of different
0:23	ways throughout the world.
0:25	[Tom] This is a cast of thousands believe it or not. Here…this is the forefront; this
0:32	is the trenches.
0:33	[Keith] You hit that button; you send out of your database a command to the satellite,
0:39	but what you really don’t realize is that it traveled thousands of miles to your ground
0:43	station. It went as high as 20,000 miles up; went to the satellite; told the satellite
0:50	what to do. The satellite telemetry changed and then it would literally come back to you
0:56	in a blink of an eye. That chain of events requires a lot of time, a lot of distance,
1:01	a lot of people, a lot of resources.
1:03	[Al] Our data is national-critical data.
1:06	[Kathy] When you see a forecast that’s provided to you on television by your local forecaster
1:11	– all that originates from NOAA and the heart of that is our NOAA satellites.
1:15	[Mike] The satellite as it flies over the ground station…you usually have maybe 10
1:21	to 12 minutes where it’s going to be in view and then it’s going to pass out of
1:24	view.
1:24	[Keith] So in 12 minutes, you have to quickly ascertain the status of the satellite to see
1:30	if its health and safety is good; then start bringing down the data - recorded data - from
1:36	the orbit revolution.
1:37	[Mike] We have to go ahead and dump that to the ground station where it’s recorded on
1:42	the ground and then after the satellite leaves the station circle then we go ahead and post-ship,
1:48	bring all that data in actually in to the site here so that it can be distributed and
1:54	processed.
1:55	[Kathy] The U.S. military does take environmental data from our spacecraft to use in their forecasts
2:03	for tactical purposes.
2:04	[Keith] Its information about the weather. Its information about the soil density content.
2:10	It just allows them to be able to make decisions real-time that they have in the field that
2:15	they can’t get any other way quickly.
2:17	[Tom] This is a 24/7 operations. We’re never closed, of course.
2:21	[Al] We collect data for search and rescue.
2:24	[Keith] We had a young girl – 16 year old Abby Sunderland – a rogue wave hit her mast,
2:32	not broke it, and capsized her boat. She fortunately had a search and rescue transmitter on her
2:37	boat that was activated and it allowed us to triangulate from NOAA’s satellites, POES
2:43	and GOES, and give her location to people who could go out to rescue her.
2:47	[Keith] It’s the imagination what you can do with the information. The whole point is
2:51	to bring it down and what can you do with it?
2:54	[Kathy] I often think of Hurricane Katrina and how many lives were saved because folks
3:04	got up in the morning that lived in those areas that were under the warnings or under
3:08	the watches and saw that image of that Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and said,
3:16	“I’m leaving.” How many lives were saved because of our satellites? That’s what we’re
3:22	all about in our satellite operations.