Analysis and characterization of the reconstruction error in interferometric synthetic aperture imaging radiometers

The European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) is intended to provide global maps of soil moisture and ocean surface salinity. Its payload MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis) is an L-band interferometric radiometer which achieves unprecedented resolution. It was successfully launched in November 2009 under the European Space Agency Earth Explorers program, and has since been acquiring high resolution images whose accuracy, precision and stability have been steadily improved. Although the analysis presented here has been done in the framework of SMOS, the conclusions are also valid for other types of missions using Synthetic Aperture Radiometers for observing planetary surfaces from space.