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1978–PRESENT · THE BREAKTHROUGH AS INSTRUMENTATION
The instruments: The last breakthrough in this section is not a patent but a lineage of instruments, descending from the Fort Wayne works that passed from Farnsworth's company through ITT to Exelis, Harris and today's L3Harris plant. L3Harris's own Indiana fact sheet states the record in one sentence: the company's technology has flown on every NOAA weather satellite in low-Earth orbit since 1978 and in geostationary orbit since 1994. The summit of the line is the Advanced Baseline Imager, the primary instrument of NOAA's GOES-R series of geostationary weather satellites: its development was contracted to Harris Corporation of Fort Wayne, it was assembled and tested in Fort Wayne, and it went to orbit on GOES-16, launched 19 November 2016. The numbers mark the jump: where the preceding generation of imagers saw in five spectral bands, the ABI sees in sixteen, and it produces more than sixty-five percent of the satellite's data products — the images in every American television forecast and hurricane cone, gathered by Fort Wayne glass. The same Fort Wayne organization carries the Cross-track Infrared Sounder line for the polar orbiters and is developing the GeoXO Imager for NOAA's next generation; the plant completed a $125 million expansion in April 2025. No single inventor signs this work, and the section ends with it deliberately: a century after the Jenneys, the city's breakthroughs are team-built instruments, and they are in orbit.
Sources:
- L3Harris, Indiana fact sheet (2026) — the Fort Wayne facility, the every-NOAA-satellite record since 1978 and 1994, the ABI and GeoXO programs, the $125 million expansion completed April 2025.
- Wikipedia, "GOES-16" — the ABI's development contracted to Harris Corporation of Fort Wayne; Spaceflight Now (2016–17) — the ABI "built by Harris Corp. of Fort Wayne, Indiana," the 19 November 2016 launch, sixteen bands against five, the share of data products.