ITT Bids Goodbye to GOES-10 Weather Satellite as it Builds Next-Gen GOES-R Imager

(Rochester, N.Y., December 11, 2009) -- ITT (NYSE: ITT) Corporation's Rochester-based Space Systems Division salutes 12 years of admirable service from the GOES-10 weather satellite, which NOAA retired last week, and looks to the future as it helps build the next-generation of NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, GOES-R.

GOES-10, which contained an imaging sensor and sounder designed and built by ITT's Space Systems Division, was launched in April 1997 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). From its geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above earth, GOES-10 tracked some of the most infamous tropical cyclones in history, including hurricane Mitch, which devastated parts of Central America in 1998; and hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005. NOAA decommissioned the GOES-10 satellite on December 2nd, 2009 after 12 years of service-seven years longer than its planned five-year mission.


"GOES-10 really pushed the state of the art in the mid '90s," said Dave Leber, deputy director for commercial and space sciences at ITT Space Systems. "We designed the GOES-10 payload to last five years, and it performed admirably for 12 years. That's a testament to the reliability that ITT builds into all of its remote sensing systems - including the Advanced Baseline Imager payload we're currently building for the NOAA GOES-R satellite."

GOES-R, scheduled to launch in 2015, will fly the ITT-designed imager that will provide 48X more data, with twice the spatial resolution, six times the scan rate, and more than three times the number of spectral channels than the current GOES imager.

Source : ITT Corporation (NYSE: ITT)