A Novel Accurate Pattern Fitting of Noisy Irregular Beam Data for the Planck Space Telescope
Kriging fitting, originally developed for geological exploitation, is here applied for fitting an expected pattern to noisy, irregular in-flight measurements of a satellite antenna.
The noise level in in-flight measurements is often so high that only the central part of the main beam appears. By the Kriging method, first a characteristic function, the regression model, is fitted to the measurements. For the main beam this is chosen to be described by a general second order polynomial. To this is added a more detailed correlation model which represents realistic deviations from the regression model but filters out the fast variations of the noise.
The method is applied on simulated measurements on the Planck RF telescope and the presented results show a considerable reduction of the noise floor of the pattern; even beam details invisible in the original measurements (a shoulder) are revealed by the pattern fitting.
Publication: AMTA 33rd Annual Symposium (AMTA2011)
Place: Englewood, Colorado, 16-21 October, 2011