A generic simulator for aperture synthesis radiometers

ESA's SMOS mission has demonstrated that Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometers can be a useful tool for Earth observation. Today, the NASA's GeoStar instrument (USA), ESA's GAS instrument (Europe), or CSSAR's GIMS instrument (China) are just three examples of planned geostationary millimeter-wave sounders using synthetic aperture interferometric radiometry for continuous atmospheric monitoring with a much improved spatial resolution. The study of the performance in terms of angular resolution and radiometric performance, and the optimization of this new type of instruments is a complex task that requires dedicated ad-hoc simulators. The SAIPRS (Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer Performance Simulator) is an ESA project aiming at the development of a generic simulator in terms of receiver architecture and array configuration, including moving antennas (and eventually changing polarization reference frames). This work summarizes the key aspects of the architecture of this simulator.