The ROSA Radio-Occultation Receiver: Missions and Next Generation Evolution

L. Marradi, A. Zin, E. Mangolini, F. Belgiovane, L. Scaciga, S. Zago, S. Landenna, V. DeCosmo, V. Catalano

Abstract:	ROSA is a dual-frequency GPS receiver developed for space applications and tailored for GPS radio occultation studies. It is developed and manufactured by Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I) under a contract with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and is designed to establish accurate global profiles of temperature and water vapour in the lower atmosphere. Moreover, ROSA antenna extended coverage allows the retrieval of total electron count (TEC) profiles in the ionosphere for space weather applications. ROSA first flight mission is on-board the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Oceansat-2 (OCS-2) satellite, launched on Sep 23, 2009 from SHAR, Sriharikota by Indian PSLV launcher. ROSA commissioning has been completed in July 2010 and a summary of the main instrument performance has been analysed and compared also to collocated events from other RO missions. ROSA will also be a payload on the forthcoming Argentinean CONAE SAC-D Aquarius mission. The ROSA instrument was delivered to CONAE in January 2010 and has been integrated on the SAC-D satellite in April 2010. Currently SAC-D is undergoing environmental tests before transfer to the launch site before end 2010. Finally, a further contract from ISRO has been awarded to Thales Alenia Space Italia to host a ROSA instrument onboard the next ISRO MeghaTropiques (MT) mission. The ROSA MT instrument is under development and foreseen for delivery to ISRO in February 2011. In the following this paper focuses on the current ROSA characteristics for the three above missions and on the results obtained from the in-flight commissioning phase on OCS-2. An evolution of ROSA has also started with the aim to design an enhanced version of the instrument (ROSA 2G) which is focused on extending its capability to GPS modernized signals and Galileo and on improvement of instrument modularity and antennas and receiver unit physical characteristics. The paper will present initial instrument design drivers and main features of the enhanced ROSA 2G instrument.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 23rd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2010) September 21 - 24, 2010 Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon Portland, OR
Pages:	1019 - 1030
Cite this article:	Marradi, L., Zin, A., Mangolini, E., Belgiovane, F., Scaciga, L., Zago, S., Landenna, S., DeCosmo, V., Catalano, V., "The ROSA Radio-Occultation Receiver: Missions and Next Generation Evolution," Proceedings of the 23rd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2010), Portland, OR, September 2010, pp. 1019-1030.
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