Mobile communications satellite antenna flight experiment definition

Abstract

There are classes of application that collectively require a variety of different types of large-aperture space antennas. Fortunately, there are a number of different deployable antenna concepts that have tremendous potential for such applications. However, these concepts vary in maturity from flight-proven designs to extremely innovative configuration definitions. But these promising concepts lack sufficient demonstrations of maturity to be seriously considered in the large size range for immediate application. The reason for this situation is an extremely limited space flight data base in addition to the technical limitations and great costs associated with meaningful ground testing of large, flexible, precision space structures. The user community of such structures, especially the commercial organizations interested in providing a Mobile Communications Satellite (MSAT) on a profit-making basis, will require significant demonstrations of technology readiness prior to application commitment. Such demonstrations will probably be based on a combination of extensive ground testing and subsequent space flight experiments. The Communications Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of Space Science and Applications sponsored a study at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to determine the technical feasibility and cost of a Shuttle-based flight experiment specifically intended for the MSAT commercial user community. The experiment will include demonstrations of technology in the areas of radio frequency (RF), sensing and control, and structures. This paper summarizes the results of the structural subsystem study. These results include experiment objective and technical approach, experiment structural description, structure/environment interactions, structural characterization, thermal characterization, structural measurement system, and experiment functional description.