Development of a Satellite Communication Emulator for the Hyperspectral Microwave Atmosphere Sounder (HYMAS)

HyMAS Instrument

NASA Goddard Flight Space Center (GSFC) has built the CoSMIR instrument aircraft to test the technology of microwave image sounding using a radiometer for validating and calibrating only a limited amount of high frequency channels. Their new work, Hyperspectral Microwave Atmospheric Sounder (HyMAS), will demonstrate microwave receiver subsystem performance equipped with 52 channels operating near 118 and 183 GHz enabled by a compact Intermediate Frequency (IF) processor module. This new IF Processor technology contains multiple channel bandwidths that are fairly broad, eliminating high-rate analog to digital (A/D) conversions and high processing requirements. HyMAS offers temperature and humidity sounding improvements with insensitivity to clouds. The hyperspectral microwave process is accomplished by using Radio Frequency (RF) antenna/receiver arrays that sample the same area and volume of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere at several different frequencies.