The Cubesat Radiometer Radio Frequency Interference Technology Validation (CubeRRT) Mission
Abstract
Passive microwave measurements made below 40GHz have experienced increased amounts of man-made radio frequency interference (RFI) over the past couple of decades. Such RFI has had a degenerative impact on various important geophysical retrievals such as soil-moisture, sea-surface salinity, atmospheric water vapor, precipitation etc. The commercial demand for spectrum allocation has increased over the past couple of years - infringing on frequencies traditionally reserved for scientific uses such as Earth observation at passive microwave frequencies. With the current trend in shared spectrum allocations, future microwave radiometers will have to co-exist with terrestrial RFI sources. The CubeSat Radiometer Radio Frequency Interference Technology Validation (CubeRRT) mission is developing a 6U Cubesat system to demonstrate RFI detection and filtering technologies for future microwave radiometer remote sensing missions. CubeRRT will operate between 6-40GHz, and demonstrate on-board real-time RFI detection on Earth brightness temperatures tuned over 1GHz steps. The expected launch date for CubeRRT is early 2018. Digital subsystems for higher frequency microwave radiometry require a larger bandwidth, as well as more processing power and on-board operation capabilities for RFI filtering. Real-time and on-board RFI filtering technology development is critical for future missions to allow manageable downlink data volumes. The enabling CubeRRT technology is a digital FPGA-based spectrometer with a bandwidth of 1 GHz that is capable of implementing advanced RFI filtering algorithms that use the kurtosis and cross-frequency RFI detection methods in real-time on board the spacecraft. The CubeRRT payload consists of 3 subsystems: a wideband helical antenna, a tunable analog radiometer subsystem, and a digital backend. The following presentation will present an overview of the system and results from the latest integration and test.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.A41H0155M
- Keywords:
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- 0394 Instruments and techniques;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 0399 General or miscellaneous;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 3399 General or miscellaneous;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES