Small satellites in general and cubesats in particular have been limited in their ability to perform RF science and communications missions by the size of the RF aperture. A large deployable membrane antenna approach has been developed to address the limits in aperture size and provide both high gain communications and sensing from UHF to C-band. The paper describes the general approach and presents performance results from ground test articles of an S-Band implementation of the architecture. The test article deploys a 1.53 m 2 active area out of a 2U (2,000 cm 3 ) volume from a 6U cubesat. The antenna array is formed from two tensioned membranes. The membranes are folded compactly for launch along with four deployable boom structures. Once on orbit, the booms deploy, unfolding and tensioning the membranes and then hold them in place for operation. Ground test articles have shown a gain of 30.5 dB at 3.6 GHz. The antenna has a 3 dB beamwidth of 3.4°, has an overall aperture efficiency of 56% and sidelobes 10 dB lower than the main lobe. The system architecture can be applied to payload volumes as small as 1⁄2U and to frequencies from UHF to K-band.
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