From GOES to GeoXO: Past Highlights to Future Horizons

When NOAA’s GOES-U satellite is launched it will be the final satellite in a heralded NOAA satellite program and bridge to another future age of advanced satellite technology. For nearly 50 years, NOAA and NASA have partnered to develop and advance NOAA’s geostationary satellites as part of the most sophisticated weather-observing, environmental monitoring, and space weather monitoring satellite system in the world. The first GOES satellite, GOES-1 (SMS-3), was launched in October of 1975.

As groundbreaking as it was, it had limited capabilities and viewed Earth only about ten percent of the time. Each generation since the launch of GOES-1 has improved significantly, bringing with new capabilities and instruments. The most recent, and last generation is the GOES-R series that first launched in 2016 with GOES-R or GOES-16.

This series came with new instruments such as the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) and the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). GOES-U, the final satellite of the series, also has the Compact Coronagraph-1 (CCOR-1) to monitor the Sun’s corona. After GOES-U launches, its successor will be a series called Geostationary Extended Observations, or GeoXO. The first satellite in the series is expected to launch in the early 2030s. GeoXO will continue NOAA’s five decades of critical Earth-observing data with new instruments onboard.