Science

GNOMES-5

GNSS radio occultation / weather · PlanetiQ

GNOMES-5 measures the weather using a trick borrowed from GPS: as satellite navigation signals graze the edge of Earth's atmosphere on their way to a receiver, they bend and slow down in ways that reveal exactly how humid, warm, or turbulent the air is at that altitude. Launched August 16, 2024 on Transporter-11, GNOMES-5 is PlanetiQ's fifth-generation GNSS radio-occultation satellite, carrying the company's proprietary Pyxis sensor—which it calls the most sensitive instrument of its kind ever flown—capable of tracking signals from all four major global navigation networks at once (America's GPS, Russia's GLONASS, Europe's Galileo, and China's BeiDou) rather than just one. That multi-constellation reach lets a single satellite generate more than 2,200 atmospheric soundings a day, penetrating weather conditions down to Earth's surface anywhere on the globe. Within 24 hours of reaching orbit, GNOMES-5 was already producing what PlanetiQ calls the highest-quality radio occultation data commercially available, feeding directly into a NOAA contract worth more than $6.5 million for a year of forecasting and climate-research data.