Instrument Catalog Development for the Proposed Future NESDIS Satellite Architecture

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has conducted a study, the NOAA Satellite Observing System Architecture (NSOSA) study, to plan for the next generation of weather satellites. This study has been an opportunity to design a modern architecture driven by user needs. The NSOSA study team developed and evaluated approximately 100 architecture alternatives, including partner and commercial contributions that are likely to become available. The process of generating these architecture alternatives had to balance comprehensiveness with depth and adequately explore a complex design space. This paper describes the results of the instrument catalog development efforts. The instrument catalog is the fundamental tool for selecting instruments, at various levels of performance capability, to be used in candidate satellite configurations. Led by a team of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) participation, the instrument catalog development activity included existing and developmental instruments relevant to the NSOSA study. Design studies were conducted for categories of instruments where needed. The Catalog enables the identification of likely capability-size-cost relationships for instruments relevant to missions that can be flown starting circa 2030 on next-generation satellites. An important outcome of the instrument catalog development is the recommendations on where incremental improvements to current instruments are likely to be the best course or where likely technology advances enable sufficiently large improvements that justify new instrument developments.