FSSCat: The Federated Satellite Systems 3Cat Mission: Demonstrating the Capabilities of CubeSats to Monitor Essential Climate Variables of the Water Cycle

Autor: Camps, Adriano, Muñoz-Martín, Joan Francesc, Ruíz-de-Azúa, Joan Adrià, Fernández, Lara, Perez, Adrian, Llaveria, David, Herbert, Christoph, Pablos, Miriam, Golkar, Alessandro, Gutiérrez, Antonio, António, Carlos, Bandeiras, Jorge, Andrade, Jorge, Cordeiro, David, Briatore, Simone, Garzaniti, Nicola, Nichele, Fabio, Mozzillo, Raffaele, Piumatti, Alessio, Cardi, Margherita, Esposito, Marco, Dijk, Chris van, Vercruyssen, Nathan, Barbosa, Joao, Hefele, John, Koeleman, Rick, Carnicero Domínguez, Bernardo, Pastena, Massimiliano, Filippazzo, Giancarlo, Reagan, Amanda
Přispěvatelé: Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España)
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Popis: 10 pages, 6 figures, 1 table
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
With the institutional support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)
Databáze: OpenAIRE