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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would be too embarrassed to return to work if I did that.
https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr
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.
[0] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2026/07/MSG_20260716...
> 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.
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
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.
Could have stopped there for 99% of websites
This admin gutted both NOAAs budget and workforce so a website redesign is probably low priority at the moment.
* https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...
* https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/G...