Since its launch, SMOS has been pointed at the deep sky for calibration purposes once a month, acquiring a small patch orf real estate each time. That was almost 6 years ago (time flies!). During this period the satellite has cumulated a large coverage of the sky.François Cabot at CESBIO used all the T1 B data of such acquisitions, of maneuvres etc, discarded all the views with the sun above the antenna plane and has produced the sky map as seen by SMOS.
This is a first cut. As the goal was always to point towards the North galactic pole, the Southern hemispehre is much less covered and thus noisier…
Figure 1 Sky Map as seen by SMOS
The results are very nice aren’t they?Note the RFI (from China) occuring regularly and acquired through the back lobes as can been seen around the “equator”?So some clean up is still necessary but we wanted to share with you this outstanding first cut result which compares very favourably with the “official” sky map, though some differences can be seen! and are quite interesting… Spot them!Note also that the map below is obtained without convoluting with the synthetic antenna pattern.
Figure 2 Reference sky map at L band