The e-st@r CubeSat: Antennas system

Abstract

In this paper the design of a deployable antenna system for CubeSats is proposed. Its manufacturing and test for the use on e-st@r CubeSat (developed at Politecnico di Torino by students' team of the Aerospace Engineering Courses) is then reported. The design procedure is based on analyzing the CubeSat standard and defining the physical and geometrical constraints, both for a general Cubesat and the particular case of e-st@r, multiple possible configurations are analyzed and compared to define the most suitable one. The use of Components Off-The-Shelf (COTS) materials is considered for the manufacturing of all parts of the system and utilized if acceptable. The lock system can be seen as one of the critical points of the system because it has to ensure that the antenna will not open during launch, but also that it opens when in orbit, so an optimization of already existing lock systems is pursued. We considered a two fault tolerant system to have an acceptable level of confidence. Briefly the manufacturing of all parts and the tests campaign of the assembled system is then proposed with some conclusive considerations on the environmental impact of the system.