This activity is intended to investigate the Grazing Angle (GA) Carrier Phase Altimetry (CaPA) using signals transmitted by the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The CaPA technique requires that the electromagnetic signal reflects coherently rather than in a diffuse regime. The hypothesis is that GA geometries enhance the likelihood of coherence scattering. It was also hypothesized that the combination of signals at slightly different frequency bands could expand the coherence conditions (widelane techniques, WL).

“Remote Sensing for Marine Litter - RESMALI” has identified the ideal parameters to study marine litter (ML) from space, including spectral bands with affordable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at top-of-atmosphere (TOA) level, in a range of wavelengths from visible to SWIR. To continue this path towards a dedicated mission, performance assessment against simulated real-case scenarios of ML is key. We want to build a simulator to estimate ML signal at TOA from a set of scenarios representing the various applications already targeted by the community (e.g.

There is growing global concern over the chemical, biological and ecological impact of marine plastic pollution. Every year many millions of tons of plastic enter the global oceans but where it goes remains largely unknown. Remote sensing has the potential to provide long-term, global monitoring but for plastics in the ocean it is still in early stages.

The straylight characterisation and verification of EO instruments are quite challenging due to the stringent requirements regarding straylight and radiometric accuracy typically set for such instruments. The straylight verification generally requires an input source as an extended black (Lmin)/white(Lmax) scene with a very sharp and high contrast transition between the dark/bright region. The realisation of such a source is not straightforward as it requires careful design so as not to introduce additional straylight by its own.

The focus of study is to build near-IR capability onto Si CCDs for Time-Delay-Integration (TDI) applications, with the main requirement being charge domain summation, which allows the lowest noise performance on these types of devices. Currently there is no product that exists to do this. Si CCDs are a well-established technology which, whilst being an “old” technology, are still world leading in certain applications up to a wavelength of ~1μm.

WASP is a prototype EO data processor, developed in the frame of the ESA Discovery Campaign on Remote Sensing of Plastic Marine Litter, exploiting Copernicus Sentinel-2 L1C images to detect and catalogue the presence of filaments of floating marine debris with high probability of containing anthropogenic litter.

•On-board disturbance sources such as solar array drive mecha

Detecting, identifying, quantifying and tracking strategies for leakage plastic litter in terrestrial as well as aquatic environments using remote sensing technologies is expected to support future continuous monitoring of waste pollution at wide covering geo-spatial scales. The methodologies to detect plastic waste from airborne or satellite observations should be based on fundamental and well-characterised optical features.

The issue of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) generated by artificial sources is an increasing problem. Areas affected by the radio spectrum pollution include: Earth Observation using passive and active microwave remote sensing, ground based remote sensing of the atmosphere, space based radio experiments and radiostronomical observations.The current level of RFI contamination on ground based and spaceborne passive sensors is already an issue.

Marine Litter Aggregation Forecast presents a new estimation of long-term global distribution of marine litter proceeding from land-based and from sea-based sources at global scale, taking advantage of numerical reanalysis databases of historical met-ocean conditions. Different machine learning techniques are applied to generate long-term climate-based series of those environmental variables that may affect the drift of marine litter over the sea surface such as currents, wind and wave-induced Stokes drift.