Enabling Technologies for High Performance Microwave and MM wave Interferometric Radiometers

Interferometric imaging is an alternative passive imaging method developed originally from radio astronomy from 1960's. Comparing with the traditional real aperture system, interferometric synthetic aperture system can realize much better spatial resolution by using thinned array. Since 1980's, this technique had been introduced in earth observation community, aiming to realize the soil moisture and ocean salinity measurement at L-band from space [1]. From 2000's, several instrument concepts at millimeter wave (53GHz & 183GHz) had been proposed to support the next-generation geostationary orbit(GEO) meteorological satellites [2, 3, 4].