Rita: A 1U Multi-Sensor Payload for the Grsssat Contributing Soil Moisture, Vegetation Analysis and RFI Detection

The Remote sensing and Interference detector with radiomeTry and vegetation Analysis (RITA) payload is one of the Remote Sensing payloads selected by the 2nd GRSS Student Grand Challenge in 2019 to fly on board of a 3U satellite that is being developed at the National space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC), United Arab Emirates University. RITA has been designed as an academic mission with a strong focus on Earth Observation techniques and technologies. This payload is equipped with a Software-Defined Radio for microwave radiometry and RFI detection, a hyperspectral camera (25 bands from 600 to 975 nm), and a LoRa transceiver, which will work in tandem to produce vegetation-related measurements with improved accuracy. Soil moisture measurements, for example, will be derived from a Total Power Microwave Radiometer working at L-band and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) measurements in a technique known as Pixel Downscaling. In this work, recent advances in the payload design will be presented, as well as a more in depth mission analysis.