Accolade for Water Mission Technology

Members of the driving force behind the European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture & Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, whose spacecraft has been in orbit since 2009, have been awarded the Certificate of Recognition by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society for developing the first synthetic aperture microwave radiometer in space. The main goal of the mission is obtaining global and regular measurements on the soil moisture and the ocean salinity that are essential for climate and hydrological models. The society makes the award only every two to three years. This award was presented to Yann Kerr from the French Center for the Study of the Biosphere from Space, Jordi Font from the Spanish Institute of Marine Sciences, and ESA's Manuel Martin-Neira.

Passive microwave sensing at L-band was determined to be the only viable way to make the required measurements. Since a huge antenna would normally have been necessary to achieve the spatial resolution to observe soil moisture and ocean salinity in this band, the design of the instrumentation posed significant challenges. The task of finding a solution fell to Dr Martin-Neira and his colleagues. It took more than 10 years of research and development, but he overcame the problem by synthesising the antenna aperture through many small antennas. The result was the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument, which has been operating on the SMOS satellite. MIRAS captures snapshots of 'brightness temperature' that correspond to microwave radiation emitted from Earth's surface, which can then be related to values of soil moisture and ocean salinity.