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This work reports on the design, manufacturing and experimental validation of a highly compact waveguide bandpass filter intended for use in future earth observation applications. The low weight, small volume and reduced cost of the filter make it well suited for use with commercial cubesat platforms, enabling the deployment of THz EO instruments at scale and commercial exploitation of this largely untapped spectral region. Passive radiometry and spectroscopy from space-borne instruments are two of the mainstays of weather modelling, climate analysis and Earth Observation (EO). Passive instruments rely on the use of highly accurate bandpass filters to limit the observed spectrum to specific bands or frequencies of interest and to prevent saturation of the sensitive receiver electronics. Of these, the terahertz spectrum (100 GHz to 3 THz) is of great interest due to the unique interaction between THz radiation and various kinds of matter. However, commercial passive EO systems are currently limited to the microwave and visible/IR spectral regions due to the extreme cost, size, and complexity of developing THz EO payloads. As a result, THz EO is currently not deployed at large-scale, limiting its application to niche scientific and governmental contexts. This filter for radiometry at 183 GHz was developed and manufactured using TeraSi facilities, and it represents a first step towards the development of complete THz EO Microsystems-in-package (MSiP). The scalable technology platform being developed at TeraSi combines silicon micromachining, heterogeneous integration, and system-in-package techniques for the realization of highly accurate, compact and low-loss THz components and sub-systems. The design and manufacturing of the filter will be presented, as well as an analysis of the expected RF performance across a set of manufacturing tolerances.
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