ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, together with NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, are both providing a wealth of information to the user community for a wide range of applications. Although both missions are still operational, they have significantly exceeded their design lifetime. For this reason, ESA is looking at future mission concepts which would adequately address the requirements of the passive L-band community beyond SMOS and SMAP.
The new paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing Journal by Dr Manuel Martin-Neira and co-authored by our Camilla Colombo and Francesca Scala together with ESA and Airbus D&S, proposes an innovative mission concept called TriHex. This concept relies on distributed spacecraft flying in formation at close distance and has been found capable of achieving high spatial resolution, radiometric resolution and accuracy, approaching the user needs in the field of passive L-band observation.
The paper is available for early access at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10105638
