Quasi-optical antennas for radiometric remote-sensing

Millimetre- and submillimetre-wave radiometers are employed for remote-sensing of the Earth's atmosphere. They must operate in several widely-spaced frequency bands which together might exceed the fundamental bandwidth of a waveguide. A wholly independent radiometer for each band would be inefficient and considerable savings in space and weight can be achieved if all bands are received via a single aperture antenna and then separated by an optical demultiplexer, the arrangement comprising a `quasi-optical' antenna. This paper discusses the requirements for, and the design of, quasi-optical antennas for radiometric remote-sensing and illustrates this with particular reference to the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit AMSU-B, which was designed and built by Matra Marconi Space UK for the UK Meteorological Office and is due to be placed in orbit on a satellite in 1996.