Guest Editorial: Special Cluster on Recent Advances in Antennas for Earth and Planetary Science

The papers in this special section bring together the antenna community to present the state-of-the-art research conducted in this field and highlight the emerging antenna technologies in addressing the Earth and planetary science instrumentation. These papers aim to present some examples of the latest advances in antenna technology for Earth and planetary science. Among these antenna topologies, a particular emphasis should be given to metasurface type of antennas. A metasurface can be considered a 2-D surface synthesized using an array of subwavelength-sized unit-cells. Such surfaces can manipulate the behavior of EM waves to achieve the desired transmission, reflection, polarization, and radiation responses. Particularly, operating in a reflection mode, such surfaces have received substantial interest in the context of reflectrarrays. Pelletier et al. present a dual-polarized reflectarray antenna operating at Ku-band frequencies to synthesize a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for snow mass measurements.