Duration: 36 months
Large aperture antennas are enabling not only for traditional communication services and radar, but also for new approaches of communication, remote sensing, deep space probing and power transfer spacecraft. Higher antenna aperture guarantees higher signal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, while its accuracy drives its spatial resolution and sensitivity. While in the past, developing high aperture antenna was a technological challenge limited by the deployment of high stiffness and heavy components against launch constraints, recent advances in on-orbit autonomous manufacturing and assembly opened the door to the development of very large and light structures directly in space. However, if many works in literature focused on large antenna manufacturing in space as in [1], many engineering challenges such as surface accuracy, spacecraft stability, and deployment reliability, still impose a limit to the actual de-risking of these technologies. The proposed project has the ambition to propose the development of a European end-to-end in-orbit assembly scenario of a large antenna and demonstrate its key technological challenges with a small-scale experimental benchmark.
By leveraging skills available in the team on modelling and control of large flexible structures [2,3] and antenna technology [4,5], this project will focus on:
- Manufacturing and assembly of a large lightweight antenna structure;
- Design an Attitude and Orbital Control algorithm that takes into account all gravitational, thermal, radiation, structural flexibility (including fuel sloshing effects) when assembling the antenna and which adapts accordingly to the variation of the spacecraft inertia;
- Propose a set of actuators and sensor to assure the alignment of each assembled module and to actively mitigate vibration after assembly;
- Propose an innovative in-situ identification of the antenna structure by directly using the diagnostic of the radio-frequency (RF) received/transmitted signal.
