CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte llegit

Títol: Development of a drone-based miniaturized Flexible Microwave Payload (FMPL) for GNSS-Reflectometry tests

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: PARK, HYUK

Departament: FIS

Títol: Development of a drone-based miniaturized Flexible Microwave Payload (FMPL) for GNSS-Reflectometry tests

Data inici oferta: 10-01-2022     Data finalització oferta: 10-09-2022


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a extern: Adrian Perez
 
Paraules clau:
Drone, GNSS-R, L-Band MWR, Remote Sensing
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
The intern will become a member of NanosatLab, the UPC
nanosatellite laboratory. The team is currently working on its
second cube-sat with GNSS-R capabilities. On top of that, the
student will actively participate in the development of a paper
presented in IGARSS'22 (IEEE International Symposium on
Geoscience and Remote Sensing), under Hyuk Park's proposal:
Development of a Drone-Based Miniaturized Flexible Microwave
Payload (FMPL) with MWR and GNSS-R instruments.
In particular, the project will consist in two main parts. On the
one hand, the development of a functional GNSS-R system based in
a SDR. On the other hand, the implementation of the system on a
quadcopter and the planning of a measure campaign to prove the
operativity of the system.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
This project has been developed in collaboration with the NanosatLab UPC, which develops CubeSats for educational and scientific purposes and in-orbit technology demonstration. More specifically, the laboratory is focused on remote sensing systems.

In recent years, the NanosatLab UPC has been developing the Flexible Microwave PayLoad (FMPL), the integration of different microwave remote sensing equipment in a single system: reflectometry Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals (GNSS-R) and microwave radiometry (MWR) in L-band. In 2022, the second version of this system, FMPL-2, is in orbit on board the CubeSat 3Cat5, which has provided precious scientific data on the climate of the earth and the evolution of climate change. The first version, FMPL-1, will be launched in the coming months aboard CubeSat 3Cat4.
The third version, FMPL-3, is now ready for launch on board the CubeSat GNSSaS.
From space, FMPL has proven to be a very useful tool for studying climate change.

This work aims to design, build and test the first FMPL for drones, the FMPL-D. This new platform will be used to evaluate new versions of FMPL. It will also be a valuable tool to study the characteristics of soil, water, ice and vegetation locally and with a spatial resolution much greater than that which can be obtained from a satellite.

The results presented in this thesis put the complexity of these systems into perspective. Firstly, in the results of the radiometer, an effect of distortion and destruction of the data obtained due to the radio frequency interference received during the measurement campaigns has been observed, highlighting the need for detection and mitigation systems interference for ground observation missions. For the GNSS reflectometry instrument, multiple flights were conducted in which large amounts of data were collected, the processing of which is still in progress. Preliminary results indicate good characteristics of the radio frequency chain.

This Final Degree Project (TFG) is the first version of the FMPL-D, culminating in the system's first version and many lessons learned.

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