Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode

yyabones about 3 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on spaceweather.gov

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

85% Positive

Analyzed from 992 words in the discussion.

Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

Former GOES engineer here. At this point I'd almost be surprised if 19 didn't have something go wrong. We had issues on almost every other satellite. GOES-17 had the loop heat pipe anomaly(Supposedly from someone stepping on it in the cleanroom...), GOES-15 (IIRC) had a micrometeorite strike, and GOES-13 had a fuel tank anomaly right before deorbit.

GOES-16 and GOES-17 are on-orbit spares, so in the extremely unlikely event of a total failure there's at least another spacecraft on-orbit ready to take up station.

That said, I have every faith in the GOES team to get to the bottom of this. They're the best, and I often wish I was back there working with them.

fishgoesblub•about 1 hour ago

> Supposedly from someone stepping on it in the cleanroom

I would be too embarrassed to return to work if I did that.

pooloo•less than a minute ago

How do they track that? Is there a log book where someone has to write to?

"Observed EMP555 step on loop heat pipe. Conducted visual inspection of the affected area; no damage found, pipe remains nominal."

Uncle_Brumpus•about 2 hours ago

Interestingly, I noticed this in aproximately real time. I had been checking up on the visible-light geocolor composite images every hour or so to look at the massive plume of Canadian wildfire smoke that was turning the skies in the northeast dark orange yesterday.

I haven't interacted with the GOES site or cared too much about the image output until the last 2 days, and the it immediately broke. Somewhat humorous to me.

justusthane•about 1 hour ago

Is this what you're talking about? https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus_band.php?sat=G16...

tomnicholas1•29 minutes ago

Anyone interested in accessing GOES data at scale will find this interesting - I created a Zarr index over the 7 billion chunks of data in the GOES-16 archive.

https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr

dekhn•about 2 hours ago

I love how "safe mode" for a satellite is basically: "extend solar panels, turn self towards sun, don't do anything unnecessary, wait for further instructions".

pphysch•about 1 hour ago

They should rebrand it as "Praise the Sun" mode. We are sorry, GOES-19 is temporarily unavailable during a planned solar worship break of indefinite length.

dabluecaboose•about 1 hour ago

The cool thing about geostationary orbits is that they're far enough out that they get 24/7 sun (Except around the equinoxes). We could easily fit a solar worship break in the schedule in between imaging and momentum dumps.

farx•about 1 hour ago

Initiate Sol Invictus mode

ImJasonH•about 2 hours ago

https://www.nola.com/news/hurricane/weather-satellite-goes-1... explains a bit more what this is, and what this means.

> The main NOAA satellite for tracking Atlantic, Gulf Coast hurricanes is out until further notice

> GOES-19 is the main instrument used to identify tropical waves as they strengthen and move over the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, providing real-time tracking for forecasting.

ls65536•30 minutes ago

Looks like they're making progress toward getting things restarted: "Update #2: The GOES-19 Safehold has been resolved and engineers are working to prepare for restart of the onboard instruments. More information on the recovery timeline will be provided when known." [0]

[0] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2026/07/MSG_20260716...

venzaspa•about 2 hours ago

As an aside, I'm always surprised how US Gov websites look like they've been made in Dreamweaver in about 2006. Not even seemingly with a emphasis on usability either.

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

While it may not be flashy, I personally find the GOES sites extremely useful. Things are often simply placed at obvious and expected URLs, so scraping or monitoring is extremely easy.

I wrote the script that provides the GOES NavSum [1] and it pretty much just builds a standardized text file and drops it in the folder. The neat thing is that this makes it really easy to programmatically scrape and parse the data.

I wrote a personal script at one point that would download the GOES-EAST CONUS image and both EAST and WEST full disk images and composite them into a wallpaper. At one point my server had 500GB of archived GOES imagery. I liked to joke with my former coworkers that I could report image anomalies before they notice because my desktop wallpaper would change every 10 minutes.

[1] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/resources/cemscs/navsum.txt

ranger207•about 2 hours ago

Hey, I have a script for updating my background too! I'm not archiving the old images though, but I've thought about it to make some cool animations

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

Hah originally making an animation was my plan, but as so often happens it fell on the backburner and then I ended up with a massive archive. I just deleted it once I realized that A) Better archives exist elsewhere and B) I wasn't going to do anything with it.

I still have the script somewhere. I should throw an LLM at it and see if I can't sand off a few rough edges.

iberator•about 2 hours ago

make torrent of it

xd1936•about 2 hours ago

Maybe if the UX was nicer, you wouldn't need to write scrapers and parsers and could just use their site.

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

We don't need a bloated React framework to show a plaintext file with the fuel tank levels. It's NOAA, not Microsoft.

jefftk•about 2 hours ago

They're scraping to automatically update the wallpaper on their desktop. That's not something a website can do, even with fantastic UX.

kube-system•about 2 hours ago

The ones that look old are old. The USG has newer design systems that you'll see used on many of the websites that have been redesigned more recently: https://designsystem.digital.gov/

This admin gutted both NOAAs budget and workforce so a website redesign is probably low priority at the moment.

dylan604•about 2 hours ago

Sites like NASA's APOD have not changed by design. So many third parties have been built up around sites that any change [w|c]ould break so much for no effective gain. Same holds true when people ask why things like NOTAMs and even NOAA's alerts are formatted the way they are.

pdntspa•about 1 hour ago

Why must everything look and be modern

ls65536•about 1 hour ago

Very unfortunate timing given the ongoing wildfires and associated smoke spreading across eastern North America in recent days.

jubilanti•about 2 hours ago

A safehold is like maintenance mode, shutting down all non-essential systems, after it detects something is wrong. Doesn't necessarily mean it is gone for good, but not a good sign.

delichon•about 2 hours ago

What is it that the space aliens don't want us to see? The obvious conclusion is that they are hiding their invasion fleet arrivals inside of hurricanes. The proof will be when the system comes back online and only permits us to see ordinary weather.

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

They're concerned because GOES-19 deployed with the newest Rothschild Space Weather Laser, which could disrupt their atmospheric camouflage

malfist•about 1 hour ago

What would a space hurricane look like?

anonymousiam•about 1 hour ago

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Lightning_storm

delichon•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_hurricane

throwway120385•about 2 hours ago

We really need to finish the Gollop Chamber.

webdoodle•9 minutes ago

Invasion of Cuba incoming?

qwertox•about 3 hours ago

Better link: https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/operations/goes/status.html

lolc•about 2 hours ago

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/#datafile-3

isaacdl•about 2 hours ago

I disagree. That just shows GOES-19 as "green", whatever that means. The OP link is also not very informative, but this link is even less so.

longwave•about 2 hours ago

The outage list at the top is up to date, but the main status page is nearly three months old - the last updated date at the end is April 20, 2026.

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

> Please note: This status information on this website is generally updated on a monthly basis. Recent outages and anomalies on data flow are highlighted at the top of the page.

ck2•about 2 hours ago

is this old cache?

* https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...

* https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/G...

dabluecaboose•about 2 hours ago

Looking at the timestamp, that's from yesterday. Nominal product delivery happens ~every 10 minutes.