NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) program: overview and current status

We present an overview and current status of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On (SWFO) Program and discuss the importance of the SWFO’s data products for the Heliophysics community. SWFO Program will ensure continuity of space weather operational data in the solar wind, providing advanced heliospheric observing capabilities from the Lagrange Point L1 and the geostationary orbit. The SWFO-L1 spacecraft will be launched in 2025, hosting a Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS), a Magnetometer (MAG), a SupraThermal Ion Sensor (STIS) and a Compact Coronagraph (CCOR), enabling continuity of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and solar wind observations from NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) which are well past their designed lifetime. A second coronagraph (CCOR-1) will fly on the next Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite to be launched in 2024 (GOES-U) and will add operational resilience to the CME imagery necessary for space weather monitoring and forecasts.