Terrestrial-based wireless transmitters can often cause interference to space-based remote sensing instrumentation, such as satellites that are designed to probe the Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere. Remote sensing observations of the Earth are often acquired using low-Earth orbit satellites that scan a narrow swath of the Earth at any one time, and orbit the Earth once each 90 minutes or so. The satellite detectors are often exposed to specific interference sources for only a few tens of milliseconds as the satellite passes overhead and the detector beam passes over the Earth's surface at very high speed, but that exposure is sufficient to produce substantial interference to the very sensitive observations being acquired by the satellite. One method of mitigating the interference is to synchronize very brief blanking of terrestrial interference sources as a remote sensing satellite using the same band passes overhead, leveraging the fact that satellite orbits are very well known and the specific point of time at which a sensor pixel will be passing over a particular point on the Earth can be determined with high accuracy. This method is one example of a broader application of coordinated interference mitigation techniques that will be explored as part of this research. The broader applications may extend beyond satellites to cases of interference between and among a large variety of land-, air-, and space-based users.
