Status of the CubeSat Radiometer Radio Frequency Interference Technology Validation (CubeRRT) Mission

The CubeSat Radiometer Radio Frequency Interference Technology Validation (CubeRRT) mission has developed and deployed into orbit a 6U CubeSat to demonstrate radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation technologies in support of future microwave radiometry missions. Microwave radiometers observe Earth’s natural thermal emissions and make important contributions to observing Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land surfaces including products such as atmospheric water vapor, temperature profiles, sea surface wind speed and direction, soil moisture, sea ice properties, and other products. Microwave radiometer measurements below 40 GHz exhibit increasing man-made RFI, having a degenerative impact on these important geophysical retrievals and potentially degrading the capabilities of future radiometer missions. To address the growing RFI problem, the CubeRRT mission was selected under ESTO’s In-space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (InVEST) program to demonstrate on-board, real-time RFI processing from 6-40 GHz. The CubeRRT payload consists of a wideband antenna subsystem developed at Ohio State, a tunable analog radiometer subsystem developed at Goddard Space Flight Center, and a digital backend processor performing real-time RFI mitigation developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The spacecraft bus was developed and integrated at Blue Canyon Technologies. The enabling CubeRRT technology is a digital Field-Programmable Gate Array-based spectrometer with a bandwidth of 1 GHz that is capable of implementing advanced RFI filtering algorithms using kurtosis and cross-frequency methods. CubeRRT was launched May 21, 2018 on the OA-9 International Space Station resupply mission and was deployed from ISS on July 13, 2018. This talk describes the development of CubeRRT and status of on-orbit operations.