NOAA 15 and 19 To Be Decommissioned Within the Next Two Weeks

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have recently announced that they are planning to decommission NOAA 15 and NOAA 19 on August 12, 2025 and August 19, 2025 respectively.

Update #7: NOAA has completed End of Life (EOL) testing activities for NOAA-15 and NOAA-19 and will commence the decommission process shortly. These two remaining satellites in the NOAA Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) Constellation are far beyond their primary mission design life. All have incurred subsystem and instrument degradation or failures and have entered a "twilight phase" where failure modes are increasingly likely. As a reminder, NOAA-18 was decommissioned on June 6, 2025 at 1740 UTC due to an unrecoverable failure to the S-Band transmitter. The remaining satellites in the legacy POES constellation will be decommissioned as follows: NOAA-15 on August 12, 2025 and NOAA-19 on August 19, 2025.

NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19 have long been core satellites for RTL-SDR users. For many of us, one of these would have been the first satellite from which we received weather data via the 137 MHz APT signal.

These NOAA satellites were marked end-of-life (EOL) back on June 16, 2025. However, EOL status still meant that transmissions would continue as normal. The EOL status simply marked that the satellites should no longer be used for mission-critical services, and that no attempts at repair or recovery would be made if needed.

On June 06, 2025, just before the EOL status officially went into effect, NOAA-18 was decommissioned and shut down due to a prior transmitter failure that left ground control in danger of being unable to control the satellite in the future. 

While nothing critical appears to have happened to the remaining NOAA-15 and NOAA-19 satellites as of yet, these are ageing satellites with various ongoing issues. NOAA-15 was launched in 1998, and NOAA-19 in 2009. They have long exceeded their design life.

As with NOAA-18's decommissioning, it does not appear that NOAA will deorbit the satellites. Instead, they will be left in orbit and put into a safe electrical state, with the transmitters shut down.

You can find more information about the decommissioning over on Carl Reinmann's usradioguy blog.