Advances in designing, building, and testing intelligent, data-driven sensors for high-resolution microwave sounding and imaging from small satellite platforms

Current critical needs of NASA, NOAA, and other agencies carrying out Earth environmental monitoring require higher-performance observing systems that offer lower noise, finer resolution, broader coverage, etc., but that are also lower-cost, can be accommodated on a wide range of launch vehicles and hosted payload platforms, as well as provide flexibility in how they are deployed and used. To achieve these ambitions, it is necessary to consider the observing system as comprising not only the sensor but also the concept of operations, processing, and potential for collaborative and synergistic observations. Here we present a new approach that enables dynamic, data-driven sensing and provides a way to test and evaluate the overall end-to-end system performance in the laboratory prior to launch with realistic Earth scenes. Recent technology advances now enable the utilization of new sensing concepts that reconfigure the sensor in real time to adjust where they are looking, their dwell time, their spatial resolution, and depending on the platform, their geometrical vantage point. For example, at frequencies spanning approximately 10-100GHz, phased array and reflectarray observations of sea surface wind (speed and direction), wide-swath polarimetric imagery, soil moisture and sea surface temperature, and atmospheric thermodynamic state that are deemed critical by NASA’s Earth Science strategic goals are now possible. These measurements would all be improved by this work, since the sensor would be configured for maximum resolution, coverage, and dwell time for regions in the scene that exhibit the highest variability and would therefore benefit the most from high-fidelity sensing. This approach also efficiently optimizes the use of a fixed set of resources. Here we describe two new systems recently funded by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to improve present capabilities for high-resolution atmospheric sensing from small satellite platforms: the Configurable Reflectarray Wideband Scanning Radiometer (CREWSR) and a Versatile, Intelligent, and Dynamic Earth Observation (VIDEO) testing and development platform for data driven and configurable sensors.