  The recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily
from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of
commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and
shown the need for development of compatible sensors primarily aimed for Earth
observation tasks including monitoring terrestrial domains, communications and
engineering tests. However, one domain that these platforms have not yet made
substantial inroads into, is in the ocean sciences. Remote sensing has long
been within the repertoire of tools for oceanographers to study dynamic large
scale physical phenomena, such as gyres and fronts, bio-geochemical process
transport, primary productivity and process studies in the coastal ocean. We
argue that the time has come for micro and nano satellites (with mass smaller
than 100 kg and 2 to 3 year development times) designed, built, tested and
flown by academic departments, for coordinated observations with robotic assets
in situ. We do so primarily by surveying SmallSat missions oriented towards
ocean observations in the recent past, and in doing so, we update the current
knowledge about what is feasible in the rapidly evolving field of platforms and
sensors for this domain. We conclude by proposing a set of candidate ocean
observing missions with an emphasis on radar-based observations, with a focus
on Synthetic Aperture Radar.
