SMOS instrument performance and calibration after six years in orbit

Abstract

ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, launched 2-Nov-2009, has been in orbit for over 6 years, and its Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) in two dimensions keeps working well. The calibration strategy remains overall as established after the commissioning phase, with a few improvements. The data for this whole period has been reprocessed with a new fully polarimetric version of the Level-1 processor which includes a refined calibration schema for the antenna losses. This reprocessing has allowed the assessment of an improved performance benchmark. An overview of the results and the progress achieved in both calibration and image reconstruction is presented in this contribution.