SMAP L-Band Microwave Radiometer: Instrument Design and First Year on Orbit.

The Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) L-band microwave radiometer is a conical scanning instrument designed to measure soil moisture with 4% volumetric accuracy at 40-km spatial resolution. SMAP is NASA's first Earth Systematic Mission developed in response to its first Earth science decadal survey. Here, the design is reviewed and the results of its first year on orbit are presented.

Amplitude-based height-reconstruction techniques for synthetic aperture ladar systems.

We examine the performance of amplitude-based height-estimation techniques for use with airborne synthetic aperture ladar (SAL) sensors in generating three-dimensional reconstructions of ground targets. Such techniques lend themselves to implementation more readily than phase-based techniques and are also more tolerant to phase instabilities that might be associated with SAL systems. For pairwise amplitude-comparison monopulse processing, we present analyses of the expected height sensitivity and bias of SAL systems in terms of the system parameters.