SMOS MISSION

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Mission implements the 2nd Earth Explorer Opportunity Mission lead by the ESA. The primary objective of the SMOS mission is the global observation of soil moisture and ocean salinity, two important parameters needed for accurate modelling of weather and climate. These variables are measured by SMOS (a microwave imaging radiometer with aperture synthesis) instrument through the brightness temperature at L-band.

SMOS payload is a L band (21 cm, 1.4 GHz) 2D interferometric radiometer on a generic Proteus platform. The mission lifetime is at least 3 years (0.5 for commissioning and 2.5 for normal operation) + 2 years (extended operation) + 10 years for the post-mission processing.

The launch is scheduled for 2009. SMOS will be launched on a sun synchronous (06:00 am ascending) circular orbit at 755 km altitude. The revisit is 3 days.

Raw physical data, level 1 and level 2 products will be produced by the PDPC (SMOS Payload Data and Processing Centre). It is an ESA center located in Villafranca (Spain) and operated under the responsibility of ESA.

The SMOS Soil Moisture objective is an accuracy of 4% on volumetric soil moisture, with three days revisit and a spatial sampling better than 50 km.

The SMOS Ocean Salinity objective is an accuracy better than 0.1 PSU, with a 10 days to monthly grid scale (200 km). Knowing that single measurement will be less accurate (~1 PSU), spatial and temporal averages will be needed to reduce the noise.