Non-redundant Golay formations for high-resolution L-band aperture synthesis

This study explores various satellite formations for passive microwave interferometry, aimed at sensing soil moisture and ocean salinity in the L-band. Golay-based satellite formations offer the largest uv coverage for a given number of satellites by minimising redundancy in inter-satellite baselines, which makes them especially well-suited for this purpose. We demonstrate that distributing the same total number of antennas as in the TriHex mission concept (Golay3) across nine smaller satellites (Golay9) yields an improved angular resolution of (Formula presented.) and a reduced maximum sidelobe level of −14.39 dB. Applying the Golay9 formation to the HexSat nano-satellite platform could yield L-band ground resolutions of less than 6 km from an altitude of 250 km.