Design and Implementation of a CubeSat Antenna Design for Space Communication

CubeSats is an emerging small satellites technology that become a de facto standard for academia and universities interested in initiating space-technology activities among their students. These small picosatellite platforms provide an easy channel to implement the hands-on education projects for students and provide them new research domains in the area. CubeSats has a standard single unit (1U) dimensions of 101010 cm3 and mass less than 1.33 KG. It has numerous applications in global positioning system (GPS), mobile broadband access, satellite television, weather forecast, remote sensing, space research, radio astronomy, earth observation, and communications. The CubeSats size poses numerous challenging requirements on the electronic` circuitry design and components selection with efficient power handling capabilities. One of the critical elements of CubeSats is the antenna design that needed to be low profile, compact size, lightweight and circularly polarized. The reconfigurable MIMO antennas and multi-element antenna arrays are also required to enhance the system performance, data rate and gain. However, due to size constraint, miniaturization techniques are required to accommodate MIMO/multi-element antenna arrays to achieve the desired characteristics of CubeSats Antennas. In the proposed research, a novel slot-based wide frequency sweep antenna will be designed at UHF band: 300~600 MHz. With the standard 1U CubeSat dimensions of 101010 cm3, it is quite challenging to design such a wide frequency tunable antenna. Several militarization techniques like reactive loading, meandered lines, slit and slot structure along with slot bending will be investigated and implemented to come up with novel antenna structure to be best suited for CubeSat applications. Also, the antenna will be circularly polarized over a wide UHF band. As the CubeSat are intended to support high date rate with high gain, the possibility of MIMO implementation and multi-element antenna array for high gain will also be considered.