Smos Instrument Performance After More Than 8 Years in Orbit and Lessons Learnt for Future L-Band Missions

ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission [1] has been in orbit for over 8 years, and its Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) in two dimensions is working well. The data for this whole period has been and is being processed with the operational version of the current Level-l processor (version v620). Also a representative part of the same data set has been processed with a working version of a new processor (v720) which is now in preparation so that homogenous records of brightness temperatures have been made available. These rich and long data records have allowed learning important lessons from the in-flight experience, and shall eventually lead into the consolidation of the new Level-l processor version (v720) with its corresponding auxiliary calibration and configuration files. Once the improvements are confirmed the new processor version shall be recommended for the operational chain.