The next three Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES): GOES-13/O/P will have similar instruments than the GOES-8/12 instruments, but will be on a different spacecraft bus. The new bus will allow improvements both to the navigation and registration, as well as the radiometrics. The first of this new series, GOES-13, was launched in 2006. Current plans call for GOES-13 to become operational after the on-orbit spare, GOES-11, is first used operationally. By supplying data through the eclipse, the GOES-13/O/P system addresses one of the major current imager limitations which are eclipse and related outages. This is possible due to spacecraft batteries. Outages due to Keep Out Zones (KOZ) will be minimized.

There will be radiometric improvements. The GOES-13+ instruments (imager and sounder) will be less noisy. A colder patch temperature is the main driver. In addition, there is a potential reduction in striping to be achieved through increasing the Imager scan-mirror's dwell time on the blackbody from 0.2 sec to 2 sec. There will be improvements in both the navigation and registration on GOES-13+. The GOES-13 navigation will be improved due to the new spacecraft bus and the use of star trackers (as opposed to the current method of edge-of-earth sensors). In general, the navigation (at nadir) will go from between 4-6 km with today's imager to less than 2 km with those on the GOES-13/O/P satellites. Both within-frame and frame-frame registration will also be improved.