FSSCat: The Federated Satellite Systems 3Cat Mission: Demonstrating the capabilities of CubeSats to monitor essential climate variables of the water cycle

• Published in: IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine
• Main Authors: Camps Carmona, Adriano José, Muñoz Martin, Joan Francesc, Ruiz De Azúa Ortega, Juan Adrián, Fernandez Capon, Lara Pilar, Pérez Portero, Adrián, Llaveria Godoy, David, Herbert, Christoph Josef, Pablos Hernández, Miriam, Golkar, Alessandro, Gutiérrez Peña, Antonio
• Other Authors: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Teoria del Senyal i Comunicacions, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Doctorat en Teoria del Senyal i Comunicacions, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. CommSensLab-UPC - Centre Específic de Recerca en Comunicació i Detecció UPC
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2022
• Subjects: Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Radiocomunicació i exploració electromagnètica::Satèl·lits i ràdioenllaços; Artificial satellites in earth sciences; Remote sensing; Microwave radiometry; Microwave integrated circuits; Microwave FET integrated circuits; Ocean temperature; Payloads; Global navigation satellite system; L-band; Satèl·lits artificials en ciències de la terra; Teledetecció; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2117/385353; https://doi.org/10.1109/MGRS.2022.3219778

The Federated Satellite Systems/ 3 Cat-5 (FSSCat) mission was the winner of the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel Small Satellite (S 3 ) Challenge and overall winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters competition. It consisted of two six-unit CubeSats. The Earth observation payloads were 1) the Flexible Microwave Payload 2 (FMPL-2) onboard 3 Cat-5/A, an L-band microwave radiometer and GNSS reflectometer (GNSS-R) implemented using a software-defined radio (SDR), and 2) the HyperScout-2 onboard 3 Cat-5/B, a hyperspectral camera, with the first experiment using artificial intelligence to discard cloudy images. FSSCat was launched on 3 September 2020 and injected into a 535-km synchronous orbit. 3 Cat-5/A was operated for three months until the payload was probably damaged by a solar flare and coronal mass ejection. During this time, all scientific requirements were met, including the generation of coarse-resolution and downscaled soil moisture (SM) maps, sea ice extent (SIE) maps, concentration and thickness maps, and even wind speed (WS) and sea surface salinity (SSS) maps, which were not originally foreseen. 3 Cat-5/B was operated a few more months until the number of images acquired met the requirements. This article briefly describes the FSSCat mission and the FMPL-2 payload and summarizes the main scientific results. This work was supported by the 2017 ESA S3 challenge and Copernicus Masters overall winner award (FSSCat project) and ESA project FSSCat Validation Experiment in MOSAIC; Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities Sensing With Pioneering Opportunistic Techniques grant RTI2018-099008-BC21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; GNSS Environmental and Societal Missions grant PID2021- 126436OB-C21; and Unidad de Excelencia Maria de Maeztu grant MDM-2016-0600. Peer Reviewed Article signat per 30 autors/es: Adriano Camps, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, United Arab Emirates University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab ...