Additive Manufactured Metal-Only Modulated Metasurface Antennas

Small satellites provide low cost access to space and they have historically been used for flight technology demonstrations and limited function space science activities. Novel antenna technologies have enabled high performance smallsat telecom, science in earth orbit, and the first Cubesat mission to Deep Space. Over the past 5 years, technologists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have designed, tested and successfully flown these innovative and enabling Smallsat antennas. This paper describes these innovations and their impact on smallsat performance for recent and future NASA missions.

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“…The first metal-only metasurface antenna was fabricated using metal additive manufacturing [15] (Fig. 7).…”

Section: B Medium Gain Antennasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advanced CubeSat Antennas for Deep Space and Earth Science Missions: A review

Chahat

Decrossas

González‐Ovejero

et al. 2019

IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag.

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“…All details about the design and manufacturing of this radiating structure, shown in Fig. 5, are provided in [16]. Equivalent electric currents are placed on a square surface Considering the geometry of S and S ′ , the far field patterns can be derived accurately from the near field measurements for angles between ±45˚.…”

Section: B Near Field Characterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Picture of the circularly polarized metasurface[16] of diameter 10λ at 32 GHz. Planar near field mappings (left (a,c,e) magnitude and right (b,d,f) phase) radiated by the metasurface at 32 GHz at a height of 5 λ.…”

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confidence: 99%

Reduced Order Models for Fast Antenna Characterization

Fuchs

Polimeridis

2019

IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat.

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A reduced order model (ROM) for antenna characterization problems is proposed. It exploits the outer dimensions of the antenna under test (AUT) and the geometry of the measurement surface scan and leads to a significant reduction of the required number of field sampling points and therefore time to measure antenna radiation patterns. The inputs of the ROM are the equivalent currents enclosing the AUT and the outputs are their corresponding radiated fields on the measurement surface. By performing the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the radiating operator, we derive the minimal order model of the system and thereby numerically construct the basis of the fields radiated by the AUT. The evaluation of the so-reduced model is expedited by using a discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) that returns the sampling positions of the radiated field. The approach is tailored to the antenna characterization problem and specifically the antenna shape and the measurement surface scan. The proposed methodology is general, it can be easily adapted to any type of radiating structures and shape of the field measurement scans. Two experimental results of complex radiating structures measured in near and far field demonstrate the interest and potentialities of the approach.

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“…They have attracted a lot of interest due to their low-profile, light weight, and simple feeding scheme. Typically, they consist of a textured surface made of either sub-wavelength patches printed on a grounded substrate or conductive pins protruding out of a metallic ground [21]- [22]. The MTS constitutive elements are arranged in a regular grid, and serve to synthesize modulated reactance patterns that enable the control of both the amplitude and phase of the aperture fields.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wideband Active Region Metasurface Antennas

Faenzi

González‐Ovejero

Maci

2020

IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat.

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Modulated metasurface (MTS) antennas with broadside beam rely on the interaction between a radially modulated equivalent impedance and a surface wave (SW) with cylindrical wave-front, launched by a point source. At the frequency where the SW wavelength matches the period of the impedance modulation, the-1 indexed (leaky) mode of the Floquet-mode expansion in cylindrical-coordinates provides a broadside beam. The mismatch between the SW wavelength and the period of the modulation imposes a limitation on the product bandwidth-gain. Here, we overcome this limitation by exponentially stretching the radial period of the impedance modulation. Doing so, an annular active region is generated on the antenna aperture, which moves from the antenna center to the circular rim as the frequency decreases. This mechanism enables a broadside beam over an extreme large bandwidth. We therefore extend significantly the applicability of these antennas, e.g., to requirements of 30 1.5 dB  gain over 30% bandwidths. Here, an analytical formulation is proposed to treat the active region migration and edge outgoing by a Fresnel-type transition function. This function predicts in closed form the antenna bandwidth and average gain. A more accurate gain versus frequency response is also introduced by an integral formula that accounts for the frequency dependent amplitude distribution of the aperture fields. The theory is validated by full-wave simulations and by measurements of a prototype realized by subwavelength elliptical patches. The presented results show that these antennas can provide a performance difficult to reach by any other flat antennas based on printed technology.

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Additive Manufactured Metal-Only Modulated Metasurface Antennas

Cited by 77 publications

References 27 publications

Advanced CubeSat Antennas for Deep Space and Earth Science Missions: A review

Advanced CubeSat Antennas for Deep Space and Earth Science Missions: A review

Reduced Order Models for Fast Antenna Characterization

Wideband Active Region Metasurface Antennas

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