NASA NTRS · 20210015133
Lessons Learned from SMAP Radiometer Pre-/Post-launch Calibration
Abstract
The Soil Moisture Active Passive(SMAP) mission was launched on 31stJanuary 2015 in a 6 AM/ 6 PM sun-synchronous orbit at 685 km altitude to measure soil moisture and free/thaw globally [1]. The passive instrument of SMAP is a fully polarimetric L-band radiometer (1.4GHz) operating with a bandwidth of 24MHz. The radiometer uses a combination of noise-diodes and Dicke-loads for internal calibration with a design similar to that used by the Aquarius or Jason series radiometers[2,3].Pre-launch calibration activities had been performed since 2012on the engineering model of the radiometer. Post-launch calibration activities have been performed to fine-tune and validate the results from the pre-launch calibration. The major calibration activities and lessons learned in the past 8 years will be described in the following sections.
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Jinzheng Peng, Jeffrey R Piepmeier, Sidharth Misra, Derek Hudson, Priscilla Mohammed, Giovanni De Amici, Emmanuel P Dinnat, David M Le Vine, Simon H Yueh, Thomas Meissner. Lessons Learned from SMAP Radiometer Pre-/Post-launch Calibration. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20210015133
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