Swot Mission Performance and Error Budget

The Surface Water & Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission (swot.jpl.nasa.gov) is a joint NASA/CNES/CSA mission that is currently scheduled for launch in 2021. The SWOT mission is a partnership between two communities, physical oceanography and hydrology, to share high vertical accuracy topography data produced by the payload configuration, whose principal instrument is the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIN). It was recommended by the 2007 National Research Council decadal review “Earth Science and Applications from Space: national Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond” for implementation by NASA. This paper will review the mission design, mission performance, and error budget.