The scientific payload contains three instruments. Two are Indian and one is from the Italian Space Agency.
- Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM)
- Scanning Scatterometer (SCAT)
- Radio Occultation Sounder for Atmospheric Studies (ROSA)
Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM)
OCM is an 8-band multi-spectral camera operating in the Visible and Near IR spectral range. This camera provides an instantaneous geometric field of view of 360 meter and a swath of 1420 km. OCM can be tilted up to + 20 degree along track.
Scanning Scatterometer (SCAT)
SCAT is an active microwave device designed and developed at ISRO/SAC, Ahmedabad. It is used to determine ocean surface level wind vectors through estimation of radar backscatter. The scatterometer system has a 1-m parabolic dish antenna and a dual feed assembly to generate two pencil beams and is scanned at a rate of 20.5 rpm to cover the entire swath. The Ku-band pencil beam scatterometer is an active microwave radar operating at 13.515 GHz providing a ground resolution cell of size 50 x 50 km. It consists of a parabolic dish antenna of 1 meter diameter which is offset mounted with a cant angle of about 46 degree with respect to earth viewing axis. This antenna is continuously rotated at 20.5 rpm using a scan mechanism with the scan axis along the +ve Yaw axis. By using two offset feeds at the focal plane of the antenna, two beams are generated which will conically scan the ground surface. The back scattered power in each beam from the ocean surface is measured to derive wind vector. It is an improved version of the one on Oceansat-1. The inner beam makes an incidence angle of 48.900 and the outer beam makes an incidence angle of 57.600 on the ground. It covers a continuous swath of 1400 km for inner beam and 1840 km for outer beam respectively. The inner and outer beams are configured in horizontal and vertical polarization respectively for both transmit and receive modes. The aim is to provide global ocean coverage and wind vector retrieval with a revisit time of 2 days.
Radio Occultation Sounder for Atmospheric Studies (ROSA)
ROSA is a new GPS occultation receiver provided by ASI (Italian Space Agency). The objective is to characterize the lower atmosphere and the ionosphere, opening the possibilities for the development of several scientific activities exploiting these new radio occultation data sets.
