Design, implementation, and testing of a microwave radiometer for RITA, a 1U payload on board of the AlainSat-1

Abstract

In 2019, the IEEE 2nd GRSS Student Grand Challenge selected the Remote sensing and Interference detector with radiomeTry and vegetation Analysis (RITA) payload to fly on board of AlainSat-1, a 3U CubeSat from the United Arab Emirates' National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC). The RITA payload is equipped with a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Software Defined Radio (SDR) for the RF signal conditioning and a System on a Chip (SoC) processor in charge of controlling the execution and processing of each experiment that conforms the payload. RITA includes an L-band microwave radiometer (MWR), a Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) detector, a LoRa transceiver, and a hyper-spectral camera. A multi-level acquisition strategy joining several sensors for the aforementioned experiments' allows this payload retrieve parameters such as: soil moisture derived from the MWR, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NVDI) obtained from the hyper-spectral camera, improved acquisition of vegetation-related measurements through the LoRa transceiver, or even the compilation of worldwide interference maps. This manuscript will focus on the design, implementation, verification, and testing of the MWR on board the RITA payload, a successor of previous CubeSat missions such as FSSCat, which carried the FMPL-2 payload, or 3Cat-4 carrying FMPL-1 payload. © 2022 IEEE.