ROCHESTER, N.Y. — It is not often that we have a local company in Rochester that has a connection to the very latest weather technology. But that has changed with L3Harris.

Chris Reith is a program manager and his company has designed and built one of the primary instruments on the new Geostationary Operational Environmental satellite (GOES).

“The advanced baseline imager (ABI) is viewing the Earth across 16 different channels measuring energy of different wave lengths along the electromagnetic spectrum,” says Reith.

It may sound complicated, but Reith says the practical side of this technology is a significant improvement over the previous generations. The amount of data that comes from the ABI is magnitudes higher and provides much crisper images across different wavelength, which gives us more information about the atmosphere in the weather that we are experiencing.

Getting this technology into space is a challenge. Reith says that the company called SpaceX launched via the Falcon Heavy Rocket back on June 25. The rocket inserts the spacecraft into a stationary orbit that is 22,300 miles above the Earth. The advantage of that geostationary orbit is it is at a similar speed to the Earth. As the Earth rotates, so does the satellite and this gives you a constant “stare” of the area of interest which for us is obviously the United States.

Wright adds how proud he is of L3Harris in providing the Advance Baseline Imager and he is certainly proud of the work that was done in Rochester.