We propose cubesounder, a program to raise the TRL of a powerful low-swap-c remote-sensing technology for commercial 3D weather data collection by deploying IT on the world view stratolite…

This federal contract award of $523,887.00 to Arizona State University (ASU) is for the "CUBESOUNDER" program, which aims to mature a low-swap-cost remote-sensing technology for commercial 3D weather data collection. The technology will be demonstrated on the WorldView Stratolite suborbital balloon platform. The awarded contract is a grant for research, with the ultimate completion date of September 30, 2024. No set-aside designation was used for this award.

ASU, a Hispanic-serving educational institution, has extensive experience in federal contract and grant work, including advanced technology development contracts with agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Department of Defense. This award leverages ASU's expertise in remote sensing, signal processing, and millimeter-wave sensor technology to advance a novel filter-bank approach that offers significant improvements in size, weight, power, and cost over existing weather sounding instruments on large U.S. weather satellites.

We propose cubesounder, a program to raise the TRL of a powerful low-swap-c remote-sensing technology for commercial 3D weather data collection by deploying IT on the world view stratolite suborbital balloon platform. Cubesounder matures a lab-proven 50-183 GHZ waveguide filter-bank technology from TRL 4 into a flight system. We then demonstrate the system by collecting 3D images of atmospheric water vapor and temperature in suborbital flight. Data from similar legacy sensors on large US weather satellites is currently the single highest impact driver of global weather forecast accuracy. As existing satellites reach the end of their service lives and high legacy sensor costs limit their potential deployment as replacements, our novel sensor technology offers a disruptive opportunity to use a commercial balloon platform to provide the weather data needed by a range of commercial and government users. Our novel filter bank technology gives our sensor a variety of inherent advantages over existing state-of-the-art sensors, including significantly lower swap-c, more spectral channels, and higher intrinsic sensor stability. Worldview is committed to making extended observations of north america and other key regions from its stratolite balloon platform. Maturing our low- swap-c cubesounder technology therefore fills a key technology GAP and lets our sensor be deployed on a balloon or cubesat. This enables commercialization of this high-impact source of critical weather data for the first time. Microwave sounding instruments collect 3D temperature and humidity data by observing 60 GHZ oxygen emission and 183 GHZ water vapor emission. MSU through atms on NOAA satellites and amsu on the NASA aqua satellite are examples of successful microwave sounding instruments on large U.S. Weather satellites from 1978 to the present day. Existing instruments require significant swap-c due to their reliance on conventional mixer receivers driven by local oscillators feeding RF filter bank backends with limited total channel counts. In contrast, our filter bank technology is compact, lightweight, consumes no electrical power, and has an increased bandwidth and channel count. Cubesounder leverages standard waveguide technology to achieve high system performance using commercially available lnas and detectors. Taken as a whole, our approach is a major improvement in swap-c over existing approaches, enabling wide low-cost sensor deployment on a range of platforms, from balloons to cubesats. Wisca and sese at arizona state university are world-leading centers of excellence in the development and deployment of remote sensing systems, (near-)space systems, millimeter-wave sensors, and signal processing. Our team consists of world experts in all of these areas. In addition to developing the cubesounder sensor technology, PI bryan was a hardware subsystem lead on spider, a successful NASA/csbf balloon-borne 90-150 GHZ radio astronomy payload launched in 2015. CO-is groppi and mauskopf have a strong track record delivering key hardware for NASA balloon payloads such as boomerang, blast, STO, and gusto. CO-i bliss brings extensive experience in remote sensing, signal processing, and RF positioning.