Development of airborne aperture synthetic radiometer (HUT-2D)

An L-band airborne radiometer using two-dimensional aperture synthesis (HUT-2D) is under development in Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) for remote sensing. The low measurement frequency is suitable for soil moisture and sea surface salinity measurements. The instrument's technical characteristics are similar to those of the European Space Agency's (ESA) SMOS) (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite instrument in order to support ESA in satellite mission instrument development work. The HUT-2D instrument overview and recent test results are presented in this paper.