Title: IceCube: 883-GHz Cloud Radiometer Ready for its Space Journey
Presenting Author: Dong L. Wu
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Co-Author(s): The IceCube Team

Abstract:
Ice clouds play an important role in the Earth's radiation and water vapor budget in the upper troposphere. Accurate observations of global cloud ice and microphysical properties are needed to quantify cloud impacts on Earth's climate system. Remote sensing with submillimeter (submm) wave radiometry is able to fill this observational need by employing a range of frequencies for cloud ice and bulk particle size retrievals. IceCube is a NASA-funded spaceflight demonstration project that flies an 883-GHz cloud radiometer on a 3-U CubeSat. It is planned on a rideshare to the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2016 and will be subsequently launched from ISS for nominal 28+ days operation. The 883-GHz cloud radiometer, has been developed at GSFC and tested thermally and mechanically under a realistic spaceflight environment. The data collected during the laboratory testing indicate that the instrument is able to achieve a precision and accuracy of 0.35 K and +/-2 K for 1-s integration. In addition, using the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, GSFC Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) builds the 3U cubesat to house the instrument that is currently being integrated and tested at the system level. The latest update on the IceCube development and performance will be presented at this forum.