Millimeter-Wave Airborne Radar for Learning and Education (MARBLE): An Undergraduate Student Mission

摘要

Supported by NASA’s Undergraduate Student Instrumentation Project (USIP), OU-IART worked with GarminInternational Inc. to develop a novel, low C-SWaP, high-altitude storm-chasing radar, called MARBLE. The radaroperates at 35 GHz (Ka-band), and the concept of operation is flying over the top of a convective storm to measurethe reflectivity and vertical motion of the clouds. The system design is extremely simple and low-cost, which usessingle-stage up-down conversion between Ka-Band operation and the X-band “base radar transceiver”. The radar isvery easy to operate by a pilot, through a simple switch. Laboratory tests and ground verifications were performed,and the system airworthiness has been validated. The systems developments started in spring 2016, and the initialengineering validation flights were performed in Sep 2018, using a NASA high-altitude aircraft (ER-2). Initial flighttests show that MARBLE can operate in high-altitude environments and obtain return signatures from various targets.Further data processing is ongoing to evaluate the effectiveness of precipitation observations. In addition, the design,development and testing process successfully served the educational goals of the program.