A252-05
The Future of CubeSat Constellations of Microwave Atmospheric Sounders: Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems (TEMPEST) Mission

Thursday, 17 December 2020: 05:46
Virtual
Steven C Reising1, Gaier Todd2, Shannon Thomas Brown2, Christian Kummerow3, Wesley K Berg3, V. Chandrasekar4, Sharmila Padmanabhan2, Boon Lim2, Cate Heneghan2, Richard Schulte3, Chandrasekar Radhakrishnan5, Yuriy Goncharenko1, Matthew Pallas6, Doug Laczkowski6, Nancy Gaytan6 and Austin Bullard6, (1)Colorado State University, Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., Fort Collins, CO, United States, (2)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (3)Colorado State University, Department of Atmospheric Science, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (4)Colorado State University, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (5)Colorado State University, Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., Fort Collins, United States, (6)Blue Canyon Technologies, Boulder, CO, United States
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
Global observations of clouds and precipitation processes are essential to improve monitoring and prediction of tropical cyclones and severe storms with substantial impacts on human life and property. Convection plays an important role in influencing global weather patterns, distributing fresh water and producing severe weather. However, fundamental gaps remain in our understanding, resulting in one of the 2017 Earth Science Decadal Survey’s “most important” science questions, “Why do convective storms, heavy precipitation, and clouds occur exactly when and where they do?”

To improve understanding of cloud and precipitation processes in various environments, rapid revisit global observations are necessary. To this end, geostationary satellites provide visible and infrared weather observations with temporal resolution of a few minutes. However, understanding the evolution of convection requires microwave atmospheric sounding observations, which penetrate deep inside storms where precipitation originates. In addition, passive microwave sounding of the Earth’s atmosphere provides the most valuable quantitative contribution to weather prediction and climate models.

To address this critical observational need, the Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems (TEMPEST) mission enables constellations of 6U CubeSats with identical low-mass, low-power millimeter-wave radiometers observing at five channels from 87 to 181 GHz. TEMPEST constellations rapidly sample convective processes, filling a critical gap in observations, as well as complementing existing and future science and operational missions.

To demonstrate the first CubeSat-based multi-frequency microwave sounder with global observations, the TEMPEST Demonstration (TEMPEST-D) satellite was launched on May 21, 2018 and was deployed from the ISS on July 13, 2018, into an initial orbit at 410-km altitude and 51.6° inclination. With nearly two years of operations to date, TEMPEST-D met its mission requirements in the first 90 days and achieved TRL 9 for both instrument and spacecraft systems. Comparisons of on-orbit measurements with five reference sensors indicate that TEMPEST-D is a very well-calibrated, highly stable radiometer, indistinguishable in performance from larger, more expensive operational sensors.

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