FSSCat: The Federated Satellite Systems ³Cat Mission: Demonstrating the capabilities of CubeSats to monitor essential climate variables of the water cycle [Instruments and Missions]

The Federated Satellite Systems/ 3 Cat-5 (FSSCat) mission was the winner of European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel Small (S ) Challenge and overall 2017 Copernicus Masters competition. It consisted two six-unit CubeSats. Earth observation payloads were 1) Flexible Microwave Payload 2 (FMPL-2) onboard Cat-5/A, an L-band microwave radiometer GNSS reflectometer (GNSS-R) implemented using a software-defined radio (SDR), 2) HyperScout-2 Cat-5/B, hyperspectral camera, with first experiment artificial intelligence to discard cloudy images. FSSCat launched on 3 September 2020 injected into 535-km synchronous orbit. Cat-5/A operated for three months until payload probably damaged by solar flare coronal mass ejection. During this time, all scientific requirements met, including generation coarse-resolution downscaled soil moisture (SM) maps, sea ice extent (SIE) concentration thickness even wind speed (WS) surface salinity (SSS) which not originally foreseen. Cat-5/B few more number images acquired met requirements. This article briefly describes FMPL-2 summarizes main results.