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Review Of Current Radiometer Technology With Suggestions For Future South African Satellites
Literature review of Passive Microwave radiometers in Space
Date : 10/08/2013
Author Information
Uploaded by : George
Uploaded on : 10/08/2013
Subject : Engineering
Given that South Africa is an emerging space nation, in a continent of emerging
space nations and economies, several technologies need to be developed to
progress the space program into a viable and sustainable endeavour. The three
main areas of space technology are communications, navigation and remote sensing.
Earth science is strongly reliant on the third of these areas for obtaining
global scientic data, on a suitable temporal/spatial scale. One of the forms
of electro-magnetic remote sensing is microwave radiometry. This dissertation
presents a short review of currently available space-faring radiometer technologies
and applications, which are then discussed in the context of today`s South
Africa. For instance Passive Microwave Radiometers (PMR) in the L-Band have
huge implications in Soil Moisture (SM) and Sea Salinity (SSS), which in turn affect
the global climate, and are being investigated by current and soon to launch
missions such as Aquarius, SMOS and SMAP. Multi-frequency radiometers are
used to classify various other aspects of Earth`s surface-atmosphere system. The
structure of this dissertation is to introduce the concepts of radiometry with a
review of current and future radiometers from literature (up to November 2011).
The user communities, current and possible, are also analysed. There is a discussion
of South Africa`s history, needs and presence in space, along with possible
constraints on a future South African instrument going to space. A technology
demonstrator passive microwave radiometer, for SM and Sea Surface Temperature
(SST) along with some atmospheric correction channels, is presented.
Synergy with data obtained from other instruments, such as an Infra-Red (IR)
sounder, is also discussed. Finally, some recommendations for future research
are made
This resource was uploaded by: George