Parabolic Antenna Lens

Parabolic antennas are commonly used at satellite ground terminals to support applications such as data delivery from science and imagery satellites, direct-to-home broadcasting, internet to underserved areas, and business connectivity because of their performance to price ratio. The performance, or efficiency, of parabolic antennas used at most ground stations worldwide is sub-optimal. Two dominant losses which reduce antenna efficiency are illumination loss and spill-over loss, and both manifest as an impact to the phase and amplitude distribution of an electromagnetic signal at the antenna’s surface. Improving the efficiency of existing parabolic antennas without significantly increasing their price is highly desirable as the additional gain realized by the antenna translates to improved data throughput or a decrease in the size, weight, and power (SWaP) burden on the user spacecraft or the main ground terminal without the installation of entirely new antennas. Current solutions to improve efficiency of antennas are expensive as they require the redesign of components such as antenna feeds or even complete replacement of an existing antenna system with a new one. Teltrium’s innovation is a Parabolic Antenna Lens (PAL) that improves the performance of parabolic antennas by using metasurfaces composed of periodic subwavelength metal/dielectric structures that resonantly couple to the electric and/or magnetic components of the incident electromagnetic fields to reduce losses that impact antenna efficiency by compensating for non-uniformities in the phase of the electromagnetic signal received or transmitted by the antenna. Two solutions will be prototyped: a horn-mount PAL that has a small metasurface in front of an antenna’s horn feed to reduce spill-over loss, and a top-mount PAL that has a metasurface placed on top of a parabolic antenna to reduce illumination loss. These two type of PALs will be integrated into COTS Ku-band antennas and performance tested.

The PAL innovation has the most direct near-term benefit to ground station terminals that provide communications services to space users. Improving the efficiency of existing antennas is a cost-effective way to gain performance that is relevant to NASA. PAL will help improve the performance of ground antennas used to support NASA spacecraft, particularly as new mission challenges drive higher communications performance.

Applications of the PAL innovation to commercial satellite ground stations are similar to those for NASA ground terminals. Commercial ground antennas including ground stations, teleports, VSATs and Direct-to-Home terminals segment can achieve improved performance with PAL, thus increasing data throughput capabilities of such systems and positively impacting business results.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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