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SMAP L-Band Microwave Radiometer: Instrument Design and First Year on Orbit.

Jeffrey R Piepmeier¹, Paolo Focardi², Kevin A Horgan¹

¹NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 USA.

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing : a Publication of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society

|July 15, 2020

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This summary is machine-generated.

The Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) mission provides accurate soil moisture data using a novel L-band radiometer. Its first year in orbit demonstrates stable performance and effective radio-frequency interference filtering.

Area of Science:

Earth Science
Remote Sensing
Microwave Radiometry

Background:

The Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) mission is NASA's first Earth Systematic Mission.
Accurate soil moisture data is crucial for understanding Earth's water and energy cycles.

Purpose of the Study:

To review the design of the SMAP L-band microwave radiometer.
To present the results from the first year of SMAP's on-orbit operations.

Main Methods:

Conical scanning L-band microwave radiometer design.
Fully polarimetric radiometer receiver with internal calibration.
Radio-frequency interference detection and filtering hardware.

Main Results:

The radiometer electronics and internal calibration sources exhibit excellent stability.

Keywords:

Calibration microwave radiometry polarimetry

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Radiometer noise equivalent differential temperature (NEDT) is less than 1 K for 17-ms samples.

Instrument performance is as expected based on sky observations and global imagery.

Conclusions:

The SMAP radiometer demonstrates high stability and accuracy in its first year of operation.
The instrument's unique features, including RFI filtering, contribute to reliable soil moisture measurements.