The Evolution from Design to Verification of the Antenna System and Mechanisms in the AcubeSAT mission

TL;DR

This paper details the three-year iterative development and analysis of the antenna system for the AcubeSAT CubeSat mission, emphasizing design decisions and feedback integration to meet specific communication constraints.

Contribution

It presents the evolution and rationale behind the in-house designed antenna system for a low-cost CubeSat, filling a gap in open-source communication solutions.

Findings

Multiple antenna design iterations over 3 years.

Final system includes an S-band microstrip and UHF deployable antenna.

Design decisions guided by ESA expert feedback.

Abstract

AcubeSAT is an open-source CubeSat mission aiming to explore the effects of microgravity and radiation on eukaryotic cells using a compact microfluidic LoC platform. It is developed by SpaceDot, a volunteer, interdisciplinary student team at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and supported by the "Fly Your Satellite! 3" program of the ESA Education Office. The scientific data of the mission is comprised of microscope images captured through the on-board integrated camera setup. As the total size of the payload data is expected to be close to 2GB over 12 months, a fast and efficient downlink fulfilling the restrictive power, cost and complexity budgets is required. Currently, there is no open-source communications system design which fully supports these specific constraints, so we opted to develop our own solutions. The antenna system underwent multiple iterations as the design matured, a process highly aided by the feedback received from the ESA experts. The final communications system configuration consists of an S-band microstrip antenna operating at 2.4GHz and a UHF deployable antenna, for the payload data and TM&TC respectively, both in-house designed. In this paper, we will present AcubeSAT's antenna system iterations that span over 3 years, as well as the rationale and analysis results behind each. The development decisions will be highlighted throughout the paper in an effort to aid in the future development of such a low-cost CubeSat mission communications system.