Connected and Unconnected Synthetic Aperture Imaging Radiometry - A Preliminary Design for SMOS-Next Array.

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has provided, for the very first time, systematic passive L-band (1420 - 1427 MHz) measurements from space with a spatial resolution of ~40 Km. Preliminary results of studies conducted within the frame of a High Resolution (HR) follow-on mission are presented. The SMOS-HR project has undergone a Phase 0 study by the French space agency. The aim of this contribution is to improve the spatial resolution capabilities of SMOS-HR from ~10 Km to ~4 Km with the aid of a swarm of nano-satellites orbiting close to the connected array selected for SMOS-HR. After SMOS and SMOS-HR, this third generation named SMOS-NEXT will be the very first one to perform aperture synthesis from space with both connected and unconnected interferometric measurements.