Overview and Status of the Joint Venture Partnerships Program BAA - Detection, Characterizing, and Mitigation of Passive Sensor Data Corrupting Emissions (DMiPS) - What DMiPS Means to NESDIS.

NESDIS is exploring methodologies, services, tools, and capabilities that may be applicable towards detecting, identifying, characterizing, and mitigating anthropogenic radio frequency (RF) emissions within or adjacent to the RF bands used for passive sensing by Earth exploration satellites.

Radio regulations contain frequency ranges where radio frequency transmissions are not allowed. However, it’s entirely possible for excessive anthropogenic RF energy to still be present in those frequency ranges. Adjacent services often have regulatory limits regarding the level of out-of-band emissions that are allowed from those services that may fall into a nearby passive band. As current and future telecommunication services, satellite services and broadband-aviation uplinks in millimeter wave bands are implemented there are potential interference risks to passive sensors, to include operational microwave sensors used by environmental space sensing systems. This interference is expected to degrade the data used by Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) Models and other applications, with resulting accuracy degradation. NESDIS is seeking to formulate a comprehensive long-term solution to interference as communication and passive instrument technologies evolve.

NESDIS’s goal with DMiPS is to develop efficient, repeatable, and effective methods to identify anthropogenic sources of interference of passive microwave remote sensing, so contaminated data can be accurately flagged and removed. Through the DMiPS BAA, NESDIS plans to identify approaches that will reduce the risk to current NESDIS and partner space systems, with the potential to implement these lessons learned into future systems and possibly mitigate harm to our current systems.