System overview on electromagnetic compensation for reflector antenna surface distortion

The system requirements and hardware implementation for electromagnetic compensation of antenna performance degradations due to thermal effects was investigated. Future commercial space communication antenna systems will utilize the 20/30 GHz frequency spectrum and support very narrow multiple beams (0.3 deg) over wide angle field of view (15-20 beamwidth). On the ground, portable and inexpensive very small aperture terminals (VSAT) for transmitting and receiving video, facsimile and data will be employed. These types of communication system puts a very stringent requirement on spacecraft antenna beam pointing stability (less than .01 deg), high gain (greater than 50 dB) and very lowside lobes (less than -25 dB). Thermal analysis performed on the advanced communication technology satellite (ACTS) has shown that the reflector surfaces, the mechanical supporting structures and metallic surfaces on the spacecraft body will distort due thermal effects from a varying solar flux. The antenna performance characteristics (e.g., pointing stability, gain, side lobe, etc.) will degrade due to thermal distortion in the reflector surface and supporting structures. Specifically, antenna RF radiation analysis has shown that pointing error is the most sensitive antenna performance parameter to thermal distortions. Other antenna parameters like peak gain, cross polarization level (beam isolation), and side lobe level will also degrade with thermal distortions. In order to restore pointing stability and in general antenna performance several compensation methods were proposed. In general these compensation methods can be classified as being either of mechanical or electromagnetic type. This paper will address only the later one. In this approach an adaptive phased array antenna feed is used to compensate for the antenna performance degradation. Extensive work has been devoted to demonstrate the feasibility of adaptive feed compensation on space communication antenna systems. This paper addresses the system requirements for such a system and identify candidate technologies (analog and digital) for possible hardware implementation.