The Flexible Microwave Payload-2: A SDR-Based GNSS-Reflectometer and L-Band Radiometer for CubeSats

• Published in: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Muñoz-Martín, Joan Francesc, Capon, Lara, Ruíz-de-Azúa, Joan Adrià, Camps, Adriano
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), Generalitat de Catalunya
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2020
• Subjects: Cubesats; GNSS-R; L-band; Radiometry; RFI; Sea ice; Soil moisture (SM)
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/236333; https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2020.2977959; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002809

This article presents the FMPL-2 on board the FSSCat mission, the 2017 ESA Small Sentinel Satellite Challenge and overall Copernicus Masters Competition winner. FMPL-2 is a passive microwave instrument based on a software-defined radio that implements a conventional global navigation satellite system - Reflectometer and an L-band radiometer, occupying 1 U of a 6 U CubeSat. The article describes the FSSC at mission context, the payload design and implementation phases, the tests results in a controlled environment, and finally the calibration algorithms applied to the downloaded data in order to extract the appropriate geophysical parameters: sea-ice coverage, sea-ice thickness (SIT), and low-resolution soil moisture. This article covers the overall payload design, from a high-level block diagram down to single-component specifications from both hardware and software points of view. The main block of the instrument is based on the combination of an FPGA, which virtualizes a dual-core ARM processor, where most of the calculus are performed, and a software-defined radio module, in charge of I/Q data demodulation. The article also explains the design and implementation of a signal conditioning board required for the correct operation and calibration of both instruments. This work was supported in part by the ESA S3 challenge award (FSSCat project) 2017 Copernicus Masters overall winner [44], in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, “Sensing with Pioneering Opportunistic Techniques” SPOT under Grant RTI2018-099008-BC21, in part by the de Excelencia Maria de Maeztu MDM-2016-0600, and in part by the ICREA Academia award by the Generalitat de Catalunya.