GOES-T launched on March 1st

 GOES-T, the third satellite of NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites had a successful launch yesterday. GOES-T joins GOES East and GOES West. After going through a testing period, GOES-T now known as GOES 18 will become GOES West. In May, GOES 18 will replace GOES 17, which has had some problems with its Advance Baseline Imager, as GOES West. GOES 17 will then become an in-orbit spare.

Direct link to abbreviated launch video on YouTube from SciNews

The Advance Baseline Imager (ABI) is new to the current series of GOES satellites in the GOES R series, currently GOES 16, GOES 17, and GOES 18. Here is a short description from NASA's GOES-T blog on what the Advance Baseline Imager does:

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is the primary instrument on the GOES-R Series for imaging Earth’s weather, oceans, and environment. ABI is used for a wide range of applications related to severe weather, hurricanes, aviation, natural hazards, the atmosphere, oceans, and cryosphere. ABI scans Earth five times faster with four times the resolution and three times the number of channels than previous GOES for more accurate and reliable forecasts and severe weather warnings.

Natural hazards referred to above includes detecting wildfires.

Two recent articles from space dot com discuss a malfunction in the GOES 17 ABI due to a lack of coolant in the ABI system due to a debris getting into the coolant piping system (see this article from space dot com).The ABI systems in GOES-T now GOES 18, has some fixes in the ABI so that this malfunction does not reoccur. I hope that this fix works. Here is a second article on Space dot com describing the GOES-T launch and what the satellite will do in orbit.

There are a nice group of articles on NASA's GOES-T blog covering various aspects of GOES-T including the launch and first stage rocket separation, main engine restart, and separation from the rocket.