Earth Explorer Biomass P-band SAR Mission: Status and Calibration Concept
Conference: EUSAR 2022 - 14th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
07/25/2022 - 07/27/2022 at Leipzig, Germany
Proceedings: EUSAR 2022
Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF
Authors:
Leanza, Antonio (SERCO B.V. for ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands)
Carbone, Adriano; Imbembo, Ernesto; Rommenb, Bjoern; Willemsen, Philip; Fehringer, Michael; Malik, Maktar; Simon, Tristan (ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands)
Scipal, Klaus (ESA-ESRIN, Frascati, Italy)
Abstract:
The Biomass mission is an Earth Explorer Mission in the ESA Earth Observation Programme. The primary objective of Biomass is to determine the worldwide distribution of forest above-ground biomass in order to reduce the major uncertainties in calculations of carbon stocks and fluxes associated with the terrestrial biosphere. Biomass will carry a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The Biomass system relies on an extensive in-orbit antenna characterisation and calibration concept which makes use of a fully polarimetric transponder. This paper provides a description of the calibration concept, the Biomass calibration transponder and the mission status.