Performance Evaluation of the Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Array Radiometer (GeoSTAR) Demonstrator Instrument

Abstract

The design, error budget, and preliminary test results of a 50-56 GHz synthetic aperture radiometer demonstration system are presented. The instrument consists of a fixed 24-element array of correlation interferometers, and is capable of producing calibrated images with 0.8 degree spatial resolution within a 17 degree wide field of view. This system has been built to demonstrate performance and a design which can be scaled to a much larger geostationary earth imager. As a baseline, such a system would consist of about 300 elements, and would be capable of providing contiguous, full hemispheric images of the earth with 1 Kelvin of radiometric precision and 50 km spatial resolution