LARGE DEPLORABLE REFLECTOR ON ETS-VIII

Engineering Test Satellite-VIII (ETS-VIII) is a three-axis-stabilized geostationary satellite intended to develop the advanced technologies for a large-scale spacecraft bus. Some of the objectives are development, test, and verification of Large Deployable Reflector (LDR). A large- scale reflector is one of key technologies for geostationary satellite communication using handheld size terminals. The reflector functions and performances will be confirmed by S-band frequency mobile communication experiments using the reflectors and active phased array feeds. The most distinctive feature of the reflector is an adoption of the module structure. The reflector is an assembly of 14 independent hexagonal modules. For this concept, technologies to estimate multi- module performance from single-module performance are important. The estimating technologies are deployment analysis, structural analysis, thermal analysis, and so on. Some of these analyses were conducted and the results confirmed adequacy of the design.