Lockheed Martin delivers second lightning tracker for NOAA weather satellite

The sensor will fly on the second next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, known as GOES-S, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Lockheed Martin team successfully completed assembly, integration, test and delivery of the second GLM instrument 13 months after the first delivery. “We reduced the build and test time of this complex instrument by 40 percent compared to the first unit,” said Jeff Vanden Beukel, Lockheed Martin GLM program director. “Now that development is complete, we are able to reduce delivery time so the GOES program can serve our nation with more accurate weather information.” A rapid increase of in-cloud lightning can precede severe weather on the ground. GLM tracks that activity and gives faster warning plus more precise location information versus current systems. It does this by tracking lightning flashes from geostationary orbit, with continuous coverage of the United States and most of the Western Hemisphere. The heart of the GLM instrument is a high-speed (500 frames per second), 1.8 megapixel focal plane, integrated with low-noise electronics and specialized optics to detect weak lightning signals, even against bright, sunlit cloud backgrounds. It was developed at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto.