ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO9773
Open Date: 15/04/2019
Closing Date: 27/05/2019 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 19.18I.01
Prog. Ref.: Fut.Mis.Prep.
Budget Ref.: E/E104-E5 – Fut.Mis.Prep.
Special Prov.: BE+DK+FR+DE+IT+NL+ES+SE+CH+GB+IE+AT+NO+FI+PT+GR+LU+CZ+RO+PL+EE+CA+SI
Tender Type: C
Price Range: 50-100 KEURO
Products: Satellites & Probes / Payloads / Instruments / RF and microwave Instruments / Microwave radiometers
Techology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / RF Payloads / EO Instruments
Establishment: ESTEC
Directorate: Directorate of EO Programmes
Division: Future Missions & Instrument Division
Contract Officer: Perez, Guiomar
Industrial Policy Measure: N/A – Not apply
Last Update Date: 15/04/2019
Update Reason: Tender issue

ESAs Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission, SMOS, in operation since November 2009, is producing global maps of soil moisture and sea surface salinity with an average resolution of 40 km. In the context of a future L-band mission, it is necessary to address the future needs for a range of applications over land and ocean that call for much enhanced spatial resolution, down to 1-10 km. With todays knowledge, the spatial resolution of a radiometer can be improved only by increasing its aperture size. Hence, this activity focuses on the study of aperture synthesis at L-band using formation flying as a potential way to increase the spatial resolutionsignificantly. An example of this is a formation consisting of 3 hexagonal arrays, 8 m in diameter (SMOS size), flying at the vertices of an equilateral triangle of about 14 m side. Such formation would be equivalent to an aperture of 24 m diameter achieving 8 kmnadir resolution. The study shall focus on all system aspects of such formation, including: formation requirements and design, sensors and actuators necessary to keep the relative position, performance (spatial frequency coverage, spatial resolution and sensitivity), distributed aperture synthesis architecture taking into account geometry parameters, calibration strategy, inter-satellite links (data and relative ranging), GNSS based relative ranging and attitude orientation, single launch accommodation configuration, FDIRaspects for the formation and related onboard ‘intelligence’, formation deployment, data and telemetry down-links with ground, formation flying in-orbit operations, main budgets per satellite (mass, power, volume), identification of critical technologies, development schedule and cost estimation.