PlanetIQ may come to the rescue in ‘weather satellite gap’ crisis

Weather forecasters will soon be facing a tough problem due to something called the 'weather satellite gap', and it may fall to a private company known as PlanetIQ to come to the rescue.

The 'weather satellite gap' was first brought to public attention, apparently, by a New York Times article last October. The article stated that, due to launch delays, lack of funding and poor management, the "United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks."

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These 'crucial satellites' are specifically those that take readings of weather and climate data as they orbit around the planet from pole-to-pole. Many of the polar-orbiting satellites currently in use are getting older, and plans to put new ones in orbit have been running into difficulties. The current satellite in orbit, Suomi NPP, is due to reach the end of its operational 'lifetime' in 2016, and its replacement — the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) — won't be ready in time to replace it.

Part of the problem, according to a Popular Science magazine article from a year and a half before that, is apparently due to Congress' dislike of the word climate in JPSS's job description.

However, a privately-owned company named PlanetIQ, based in Bethesda, Maryland, wants to fill that gap by putting a small fleet (or 'constellation') of weather satellites into orbit. The data these satellites gather would belong to the company, but it would sell the information to the government and civilian weather forecasting agencies, at a lower cost than what is currently spent for the government to launch satellites.

"We estimate that for all U.S. civilian and defense needs globally for both terrestrial and space weather applications, the cost to government agencies in the U.S. will be less than $70 million per year," said PlanetIQ CEO Anne Hale Miglarese, according to Weather Underground. According to that same article, the cost of the government's last polar orbiting satellite, launch in 2011, was $1.5 billion.

So, if we have geostationary weather satellites, why do we need the polar-orbiting ones? Unlike a geostationary weather satellite, that sits further out in orbit and only takes images and data for one part of the planet, a polar-orbiting satellite circles the planet several times a day, and provides crucial global data that goes into weather prediction models and climate records. Also, due to the polar-orbiting satellite's lower orbit, the images and data it collects have better resolution, allowing for more accurate information to be fed into weather models.

"Without observations from satellites that orbit our planet from pole to pole, we now know that the computer model which predicted Hurricane Sandy would slam into the Northeast U.S. five days in advance would have instead showed the storm staying out to sea," Miglarese told Congress, according to Weather Underground. This same claim was expressed by representatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year.

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With government budgets being shaved so thinly in recent years, it may fall to private efforts to pick up the slack, especially when companies like SpaceX Corporation have shown such great successes with their Dragon spacecraft, and more private space companies seem to be starting up all the time. However, there may be another option open that may be overlooked, or at least isn't being discussed.

Back in January, Dextre, the Canadian-built robot companion to the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, ran through a series of tests to see if it could repair and refuel satellites in orbit. This option wouldn't be open to the geostationary satellites, since it would take the ISS too far out of its orbit to reach them, but it would be much easier the station to reach polar-orbiting satellites. That wouldn't solve any problems of the need for enhancements in the satellites' technology (unless Dextre could also swap out parts), but it could certainly keep them in orbit longer and reduce any potential gap we may encounter in the future.

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