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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Cubesats
• GNSS-R
• $L$ -band%22%2C%22default_operator%22%3A%22AND%22%7D%7D%7D"> <named-content xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" content-type="math" xlink:type="simple"> <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L$</tex-math> </inline-formula> </named-content>-band
• radiometry
• RFI
• sea ice