Millimeter-wave receivers for low-cost CubeSat platforms

Recent advances in low-power millimeterwave low-noise amplifier technologies have enabled the hosting of high-performance atmospheric sounding instruments on very small satellites. Microwave instrumentation is particularly well suited for such implementations, as the sensor requirements for power, pointing, and spatial resolution (aperture size) can readily be accommodated by a nanosatellite platform. Several missions have been formulated to demonstrate the core technologies. The first mission, the Microsized Microwave Atmospheric Satellite (MicroMAS), will demonstrate temperature sounding in nine channels near 118 GHz. MicroMAS is currently onboard the International Space Station awaiting deployment for a 100-day mission. The Microwave Radiometer Technology Acceleration (MiRaTA) cubesat will demonstrate multi-band atmospheric sounding and co-located GPS radio occultation. MiRaTA will launch in early 2016, and will fly a tri-band sounder (60, 183, and 206 GHz) and a GPS radio occultation (GPS-RO) sensor. Both MicroMAS and MiRaTA are 3U CubeSats (aggregates of 10 × 10 × 10 cm cubes). We present recent work to develop ultra-compact receiver modules for the MicroMAS and MiRaTA missions.