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Completed TRL 4 (started at 2, targeting 4)
The NASA Science Mission Directorate has a critical need for advanced deployable antenna apertures operating at millimeter-wave frequencies from CubeSat platforms. This proposal is to fulfill the technology gap and develop a novel type of ultra-low-loss millimeter-wave metasurface holographic antennas to support a wide range of passive remote sensing applications beyond Ka-band up to 200 GHz. Enabled by a breakthrough dielectric substrate material that is electrically low-loss, thermally high-conductive, and mechanically robust, the proposed holographic antennas will be designed, synthesized, and verified including CubeSat platform effects. Mechanical feasibility, radiometer system architectures, integration with antenna feeds, and fabrication flow will be studied and evaluated in the project. The Phase 1 project goal is to demonstrate the design concept of compact-size, deployable, low-profile, lightweight, easy-to-fabricate and high-performance metasurface antennas, which are also cost-effective and can be an excellent fit for NASA remote sensing and other commercial wireless applications.
NASA Science Mission Directorate missions can greatly benefit from adopting and integrating the proposed millimeter-wave metasurface holographic antennas on CubeSat platform for remote sensing applications including weather forecasting, oceanography, ozone, soil moisture measurements, and astrochemistry. The unique attributes (low profile, light weight, ultra-low-loss, easy-to-fabricate) make it an excellent technology to enable cost-effective high-performance antennas beyond Ka-band for CubeSat applications.
The technology developed in this Phase 1 project can be adopted as a critical antenna solution to support the increasing demand for high-capacity, high-speed point-to-point wireless backhaul communication, for example, operating at FCC designated D-band to enable beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G high-throughput links in dense urban environments.
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