Q&A with Scott Bolton, principal investigator on NASA’s Juno mission

The second satellite in a quartet of new NOAA weather observatories is awaiting liftoff Thursday aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, heading for a position 22,000 miles from Earth to scan the western United States and Pacific Ocean for typhoons, wildfires and fog.

NOAA’s next geostationary weather satellite, GOES-S, was raised on top of an Atlas 5 launcher Friday at Cape Canaveral in preparation for liftoff March 1 to keep watch over the Pacific Ocean and the Western United States.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, standing 189 feet tall and and weighing 720,000 pounds, unleashes 860,000 pounds of thrust from its main engine at 10:30 a.m. local time (1:30 p.m. EST; 1830 GMT) today to launch the commercial WorldView 4 Earth-imaging satellite for DigitalGlobe from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.