(Project Manager Art Azarbarzin) DPR is the acronym, is a Dual Precipitation Radar, so it's comprised of
two radars. The complete two separate boxes roughly about you know four
hundred kilogram type, pretty sized, pretty big radars. They, one is at 13
gigahertz, the other at 35 gigahertz. The radars, once they arrive here they go
through some processing make sure during a shipment there was no damage done to
radars. Even though we do have shock monitors on the boxes that make sure
there was no, no unexpected incident happened during the transportation.
However, despite, in spite of that we still go to a processing in-house here
that we check and make sure functionally they're still working properly. Before
they hand it over to NASA. And that would take over the course of a two-week
period before we have our official review. That we go through a readiness of
NASA of accepting that and putting it on a spacecraft. And JAXA also presents
to us that they have done all the testing that following the arrival at
Goddard that everything meets the requirements as expected. And then the
instruments are handed over to us.
(Deputy Proj. Mgr. Candace Carlisle) The Dual Precipitation Radar or DPR has two parts.
The first is the Ka PR and the second is Ku PR. Those are two different bands and it provides measurements
simultaneous measurements in both of the bands and it can be used to make
combined products together with the GMI that allow the scientists to determine a
lot more about precipitation from rain through snow be it light or be it heavy
than they know today.