The Flexible Microwave Payload-2: A SDR-Based GNSS-Reflectometer and L -Band Radiometer for CubeSats
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 syste...
Published in: | IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing |
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Main Authors: | , , , |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
IEEE
2020
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2020.2977959 https://doaj.org/article/cb0422868439445abd8a99d6bbc8e4ce |
Summary: | 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. |
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