Aerospace Seminar

The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission is now in its Implementation Phase with a scheduled launch in October, 2014.  The SMAP mission is designed to produce high-resolution and accurate global maps of soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state using an L-band (1.26 GHz) non-imaging synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and an L-band (1.41 GHz) radiometer.  The simultaneous radar and radiometer measurements will be combined to derive global soil moisture maps at 9 km resolution with a 2 to 3-day revisit.  The radar measurements also allow the binary detection of surface freeze/thaw state.    The SMAP mission is being developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which is building the spacecraft, the instrument and the science processing system.  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is providing the L-band radiometer and Level 4 science processing.   SMAP will be launched into a polar sun synchronous orbit with a  685 km altitude aboard a Delta II launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.   The L-band SAR and radiometer utilize a common 6 m mesh deployable offset fed reflector antenna that rotates at 13 to 14.6 rpm to provide high resolution with a 1000 km measurement swath that enables global coverage every 2-3 days.