EarthCARE/CPR development status and performance

Abstract

The Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) is a Japanese-European collaborative earth observation satellite mission. The Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) is one of the EarthCARE instruments and it is the world's first on-board millimeter-wave Doppler radar in space. The Japan Aerospace exploration agency (JAXA) is responsible for development of the CPR in this mission in cooperation with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). This paper mainly describes the development status and performance of EarthCARE CPR Proto Flight Model (PFM).