Multibeam focal plane arrays with digital beamforming for high precision space-borne ocean remote sensing

Oleg A. Iupikov, Marianna V. Ivashina, Niels Skou, Cecilia Cappellin, Knud Pontoppidan, Cornelis G.M. van´t Klooster

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Abstract

The present-day ocean remote sensing instruments that operate at low microwave frequencies are limited in spatial resolution and do not allow for monitoring of the coastal waters. This is due to the difficulties of employing a large reflector antenna on a satellite platform, and generating high-quality pencil beams at multiple frequencies. Recent advances in digital beamforming focal-plane arrays (FPAs) have been exploited in this paper to overcome the above problems. A holistic design procedure for such novel multibeam radiometers has been developed, where: 1) the antenna system specifications are derived directly from the requirements to oceanographic surveys for future satellite missions and 2) the numbers of FPA elements/receivers are determined through a dedicated optimum beamforming procedure minimizing the distance to coast. This approach has been applied to synthesize FPAs for two alternative radiometer systems: a conical scanner with an offset parabolic reflector and a stationary wide-scan torus reflector system, each operating at C -, X-, and Ku-bands. Numerical results predict excellent beam performance for both systems with as low as 0.14% total received power over the land.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8068265
Pages (from-to)737-748
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
Volume66
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2018

Funding

Manuscript received August 1, 2016; revised August 22, 2017; accepted October 4, 2017. Date of publication October 16, 2017; date of current version February 1, 2018. This work was supported in part by the framework of the Advanced Multi-Beam Radiometers Project that is a collaborative effort between TICRA, DTU-Space (Denmark), HPS (Germany), and Chalmers, in part by the European Space Agency (contract 4000107369-12-NL-MH), in part by the Swedish Research Council, and in part by the Swedish National Space Board grants. (Corresponding author: Oleg A. Iupikov.) O. A. Iupikov and M. V. Ivashina are with the Signals and Systems Department, Chalmers University of Technology, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]).

Keywords

  • Array antennas
  • microwave radiometers
  • reflector antenna feeds

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