Summary
In 2012, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) selected the CYclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission coordinated by the University of Michigan as a low-cost and high-science Earth Venture Mission. The CYGNSS mission was originally proposed for ocean surface wind speed estimation over Tropical Cyclones (TCs) using Earth-reflected Global Positioning System (GPS) signals, as signals of opportunity. The orbital configuration of each CYGNSS satellite is a circular Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with an altitude ~520 km and an inclination angle of ~35°. Each single Delay Doppler Mapping Instrument (DDMI) aboard the eight CYGNSS microsatellites collects forward scattered signals along four specular directions (incidence angle of the incident wave equals incidence angle of the reflected wave) corresponding to four different transmitting GPS spacecrafts, simultaneously. As such, CYGNSS allows one to sample the Earth’s surface along 32 tracks simultaneously, within a wide range of the satellites’ elevation angles over tropical latitudes. Current CYGNSS follow-on missions are Spire Global (5 SmallSats), BuFeng-1 (2 SmallSats), FengYun-3 (4 SmallSats), Triton (1 SmallSat), Muon Space (3 SmallSats), and Tianmu-1 (22 SmallSats). These missions continue to expand, which will add to future missions such as HydroGNSS (2 SmallSats), Amazonia (2 SmallSats), and Atlántica (8 SmallSats). In addition to ocean surface wind speed estimation, the use of GPS Earth-reflected signals has also shown a significant ability to retrieve more geophysical parameters such as Sea Ice Concentration (SIC), Freeze/Thaw (F/T), and Soil Moisture Content (SMC).
Brief biography
Hugo Carreno-Luengo (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Ingeniero Aeronáutico degree (Plan de Estudios 2000, “B.Sc.+M.Sc.”), specialization in Spacecrafts, from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos (ETSIA), the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain, in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree (cum laude) from the Department of Signal Theory and Communications (TSC), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2016. He was a Postdoc Fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and with the NASA CYGNSS Science Team. In 2019, he joined the NASA CYGNSS Mission Team, working directly with the PI, as an Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan (U-of-M) College of Engineering, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, under a contract with the NASA Science Mission Directorate. He currently serves as an Associate Research Scientist. He is the PI of the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) Freeze/thaw wildfires Risk prEdiction (FIRE) project. His research interests include GNSS-Reflectometry methods, applications, and technology. Dr. Carreno-Luengo was the recipient of the U-of-M Research Faculty Recognition Award by the Office of the Vice-Provost for Research in 2024. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He serves on the Editorial Board of MDPI Remote Sensing, and he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.