About AMSR  › Aqua/AMSR-E › Sensor
Instrument specifications and general summaries of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR), and its sister instrument, the AMSR for EOS (AMSR-E), which were developed by JAXA, are described.

Aqua/AMSR-E

Sensor

AMSR-E is a modified version of AMSR that flew aboard ADEOS-II and is intended to fly on the EOS Aqua platform. Major modifications include scaling down the antenna size (from 2.0m to 1.6m) due to the limitation of the fairing size, employing a deployable antenna system, and removing the 50GHz channels. Since Aqua's orbit altitude of approximately 700km is lower than that of ADEOS-II, the spatial resolution remains nearly unaffected by this down sizing of the antenna. Information on the oxygen absorption line complex in the 50- to 60-GHz band is provided by the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), one of the Aqua satellite mission instrument.

Center Frequency (GHz) 6.925 10.65 18.7 23.8 36.5 89.0 89.0
A B
Band Width (MHz) 350 100 200 400 1000 3000
Polarization Vertical and Horizontal
3dB Beam Width (° ) 2.2 1.5 0.8 0.92 0.42 0.19 0.18
IFOV (km) 43×75 29×51 16×27 18×32 8.2×14.4 3.7×6.5 3.5×5.9
Sampling Interval (km) 9×10 4.5×4 4.5×6
Temperature Sensitivity (K) 0.34 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.7 1.2 1.2
Incidence Angle (° ) 55.0 54.5
Dynamic Range (K) 2.7 - 340
Swath Width (km) Approximately 1450
Integration Time (msec) 2.5 1.2
Quantization (bit) 12 10
Scan Cycle (sec) 1.5

AMSR-E Overview
AMSR-E Orbit