NES Optica Monthly Meeting: Recent Progress in Small Satellite Constellations for Passive Microwave Atmospheric Sensing
When
April 16, 2026
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Where
55 Old Bedford Road
Lincoln,
MA
01742
Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds will host the New England Section of Optica’s event in our Lincoln office on April 16, 2026.
Event Abstract
New Earth atmospheric remote sensing systems are needed that provide observations with low noise, fine spatial and spectral resolution, broad coverage, and better revisit rates relative to current state-of-the-art to improve numerical weather prediction capabilities and inform detailed scientific studies of weather and climate. These new systems increasingly must be low-cost, feasible for accommodation on a wide range of launch vehicles and hosted payload platforms, and provide flexibility in how they are deployed and used. These considerations motivate the use of relatively low-cost CubeSat or small satellite platforms. In this seminar, we will explore the emergence of small satellites for addressing some of the most challenging remote sensing problems and examine in detail the design, analysis, and implementation of missions that rely upon small satellite platforms to execute the mission. Additionally, we will consider a new class of large-format/large-aperture beam-steering array sensors that are lightweight and foldable, making them compatible with small satellite platforms. These highly configurable sensors permit new “cognitive sensing” concepts, where the sensor is aware of the characteristics of the scene to be viewed and can reconfigure itself in real time to adjust where it is looking, the dwell time, the spatial resolution, and depending on the platform, the geometrical vantage point. This seminar will provide an overview of the basic system elements comprising modern small satellite atmospheric sensing missions and highlights recent technology development work to enable high-resolution, cognitive sensing in a small-satellite mission.
Agenda
- Dinner: 6:00 – 7:00 PM
- Presentation: 7:00 – 8:00 PM
Speaker
William J. Blackwell, Laboratory Fellow with the Applied Space Systems Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA