About the Space desk

The Space desk reads the agencies that watch the sky and fly in it. Launch schedules and live webcasts come from the Launch Library and the providers’ own channels; solar activity, geomagnetic storms and aurora forecasts from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center with imagery from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory; Earth and planetary imagery from NASA, ESA and the Copernicus Sentinel satellites; and astronomy pictures from the European Southern Observatory, NOIRLab and NASA’s image libraries.

When a launch is imminent the desk’s player carries the provider’s webcast from the terminal count through orbit, and the network’s home page cuts to it; during a launch nothing interrupts the picture. Gallery imagery is limited to public-domain and openly licensed sources and credited to the observatory or mission that produced it.

Space weather alerts are relayed on NOAA’s own G, S and R scales. As with every desk, the agency’s name, the time of issue and a link to the original record travel with each item.