TriHex: Combining Formation Flying, General Circular Orbits, and Alias-Free Imaging, for High-Resolution L-Band Aperture Synthesis

Abstract

ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, together with NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, are both providing a wealth of information to the user community for a wide range of applications. Although both missions are still operational, they have significantly exceeded their design life time. For this reason, ESA is looking at future mission concepts which would adequately address the requirements of the passive L-band community beyond SMOS and SMAP. This paper proposes one mission concept, TriHex, that has been found capable of achieving high spatial resolution, radiometric resolution and accuracy, approaching the user needs. This is possible by the combination of aperture synthesis, formation flying, the use of general circular orbits and alias free imaging.