When a solar flare leaps out from around the sun, a small fleet of scientific instruments designed and built at the University of Colorado Boulder form a first line of defense—spotting these massive eruptions before any other instrument in space, then relaying the information to Earth in seconds.
When a solar flare leaps out from around the sun, a small fleet of scientific instruments designed and built at the University of Colorado Boulder form a first line of defense—spotting these massive eruptions before any other instrument in space, then relaying the information to Earth in seconds.
On June 25, the fourth and final instrument in this suite, known as the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors (EXIS) program, is scheduled to launch into space. It will fly aboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-U (GOES-U)—the latest in a series of GOES-R satellites that monitor weather on Earth from orbit. GOES-U, which will be renamed GOES-19 once it reaches geostationary orbit, will blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
The event marks the culmination of nearly 20 years of work for scientists and engineers at CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).
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A technician installs an EXIS instrument onto the solar pointing platform of the GOES-T satellite, which launched in 2022. (Photo Credit: NOAA Satellites)
