Spectrometer for CubeSats

About

Weather forecasting plays an integral role across a multitude of industries such as insurance, agriculture, maritime, commodity trading and many more. Despite the widespread economic impact of accurate weather predictions, companies are currently remarkably limited in the meteorological data they can access. Satellite observations provide critical global coverage of weather systems, however, to date they have been limited to large, expensive satellites operated by national meteorological organisations. Such systems take a long time to build, are very expensive to launch and have a long lifetime with limited update rates. STFC has developed a Hyperspectral Multiband Spectrometer (HYMS) designed for a CubeSat installation enabling advanced weather prediction, spectrum management and mitigation of radio frequency interference. CubeSats are miniaturised satellites which can be deployed in constellations, making them ideally suited to high measurement repeat rates, high surface coverage and the capture of accurate, up to date data. The technology offers an extremely capable microwave radiometer operating on critical meteorological observation bands to provide measurements for advanced numerical weather prediction (NWP). Owing to the high spectral resolution, the instrument can also assess the impact of radio frequency interference (RFI) on typical radiometric observations, and opens up paths towards RFI mitigation and spectrum management. The technology is a novel and highly advanced ‘Hyper-spectral’ remote sensing instrument with on-board Artificial Intelligence capabilities. The system will be able to identify, map and assess the RFI sources in the protected Earth Observation bands and adjacent unprotected bands. This is achieved by sampling molecular spectra of different compounds across multiple channels and over wide spectral ranges. This technology allows the coexistence of microwave sounders with RFI sources and thereby opens up the possibilities of the novel use of unprotected parts of the microwave spectrum, for example, 63.3 GHz to 67.9 GHz. A compact radiometer has been demonstrated in the lab, demonstrating for the first-time hyperspectral microwave radiometry with high radiometric sensitivity, equivalent to large limited channel satellites. Further development to classify noise is being carried out currently.