Lessons Learned from SMAP Radiometer Pre-/Post-launch Calibration
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Peng, Jinzheng; Piepmeier, Jeffrey R.; Misra, Sidharth; Hudson, Derek; Mohammed, Priscilla; De Amici, Giovanni; Dinnat, Emmanuel P.; Le Vine, David M.; Yueh, Simon H.; Meissner, Thomas
- Source
- 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS , 2021 IEEE International. :1003-1006 Jul, 2021
- Subject
- Aerospace
Geoscience
Photonics and Electrooptics
Signal Processing and Analysis
Soil measurements
Moisture measurement
Instruments
Bandwidth
Radiometry
Extraterrestrial measurements
Orbits
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-7003
The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission was launched on 31 st January 2015 in a 6 AM/ 6 PM sun-synchronous orbit at 685 km altitude to measure soil moisture and free/thaw globally [1]. The passive instrument of SMAP is a fully polarimetric L-band radiometer (1.4GHz) operating with a bandwidth of 24MHz. The radiometer uses a combination of noise-diodes and Dicke-loads for internal calibration with a design similar to that used by the Aquarius or Jason series radiometers [2], [3]. Pre-launch calibration activities had been performed since 2012 on the engineering model of the radiometer. Post-launch calibration activities have been performed to fine-tune and validate the results from the pre-launch calibration. The major calibration activities and lessons learned in the past 8 years will be described in the following sessions.