DeepSpace Technologies, Inc — Department of Commerce SBIR Phase I: 9.4

Description

Anthropogenic Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI), or interference from human-generated sources, continues to plague spaceborne microwave radiometer and sounder instruments. Unmitigated RFI adversely affects the quality and reliability of Earth remote sensing data used for determining water availability, quality, and risk. Proliferation of wireless technologies, Earth-orbiting commercial satellite constellations, and crowding of spectral resources creates a dynamic cloud of interfering signals that corrupt naturally-occurring radio signals received by radiometers used to accurately monitor the Earth’s water cycle. Despite recent advances in digital radiometer technology and international regulation of passive Earth Observation radio frequency bands, RFI itself is becoming more complex and elusive to mitigate. This problem worsens at higher frequencies that have multi-GHz passive spectrum allocations adjacent to interfering sources. New wideband receiver technology and accompanying algorithms that mitigate more complex and wider bandwidth RFI is needed now. DeepSpace Technologies proposes such technology. DeepSpace Technologies proposes the Ultrawideband RFI-Mitigating Software-Defined Radiometer (URMiRAD), a digital receiver that uses real-time onboard cyclostationarity signal processing to clean RFI microwave measurements. We anticipate our technology will be sold to commercial providers of satellite services to the Earth Science, Military, and Commercial Space communities, including customers such as NASA, Northrop Grumman, and Hawkeye 360.