PHOCUS Radiometer Payload

Paper in proceeding, 2011

PHOCUS – Particles, Hydrogen and Oxygen Chemistry in the Upper Summer Mesosphere is a Swedish sounding rocket experiment with the main goal of investigating the upper atmosphere in the altitude range 50-110 km. This paper describes the radiometer instruments (SondRad) in the PHOCUS payload, which are intended to explore the water vapour concentration in connection with the appearance of noctilucent (night shining) clouds. The design of the radiometer system has been done in collaboration between Omnisys Instruments AB and the Group for Advanced Receiver Development (GARD) at Chalmers University of Technology where Omnisys was responsible for the design, implementation, and verification of the radiometers and backend and GARD was responsible for the optics and calibration systems. The radiometers cover the water absorption lines at 183 GHz and 557 GHz with 67 kHz backend resolution. The 183 GHz channel is a side-looking radiometer while the 557 GHz radiometer is placed along the rocket axis looking in the forward direction. Both channels employ sub-harmonically pumped Schottky mixers and FFT spectrometer back-ends. The 183 GHz channel employs a CW-pilot signal calibrating the entire receiving chain while the IF-chain of the 557 GHz channel is calibrated by injecting a signal from a calibrated noise source through a directional coupler. The instrument will collect complete spectra for both the 183 and 557 GHz with 300 Hz rate for the 183 GHz channel and 10 Hz for the 557 GHz channel for about 60 seconds reaching the apogee of the flight trajectory and 100 seconds after that. With lossless data compression using variable resolution over the spectrum, the data set is reduced to 2 x 12 MByte.