Nebula Public Library

This activity investigates how mega-constellations can be used to provide low-Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft with broadband low-latency services, a novel Concept with potential to disrupt spacecraft design, operation, and performance by allowing spacecraft to access mega-constellations’ enormous resources (Tbit/s throughputs) and global coverage at a lower cost than traditional data relay systems and ground station networks (two to fifty times cheaper, that is, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month for a daily net capacity from hundredths of Gbit up to almost ten Tbit).

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).

This study focused on the synergistic retrieval of cloud information from active and passive observations. While this synergistic approach is well established for precipitation, it is used less for clouds.

With the launch of the first Sentinel satellites, a new era in Earth observation has started that allows for the development of new approaches that use these novel observations at high temporal frequencies and fine spatial resolution with complementary information from the optical and microwave spectral domains. One very important application for is the monitoring of crops.