Advanced receiver for future L-band radiometer

Abstract

ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was launched 2 Nov 2009 and it is still providing L-band measurements after more than 12 years in orbit. The main mission products were global maps of soil moisture and sea surface salinity at an average resolution of 40 km, although SMOS also delivers measurements of thin sea ice, frost/thaw soils, high winds, ocean surface wind and Sun brightness temperature. To better match the needs of the L-band scientific community, regarding spatial resolution, multi-angular capability and sensitivity, ESA is carrying out several instrument pre-development activities (see [5]) where the technology that would be required to achieve that goal gets consolidated. In the frame of these ESA developments, SENER Aeroespacial has developed two advanced L-band receivers (ALR) with parallel dual polarisation, high sensitivity, high out-of-band interference rejection and digital in-phase quadrature demodulation. This paper describes the technological concepts applied to the receiver as well as the demonstrator test results and achieved performance.