Development of a 6-meter Crossed Dipole Antenna Deployment Mechanism for CubeSat Applications

Deployable systems for CubeSat applications have significantly matured in recent year as ever more ambitious missions drive innovations in design. Collecting high frequency signals (5-30 MHz) is particularly challenging due to the corresponding increase in size needed for a receiving antenna to operate in that frequency range. This paper describes the mechanical design, analysis, test, build, and deployment of a 6 meter x 6 meter crossed dipole CubeSat antenna. The antenna system was paired with a galactic noise limited receiver on a flight mission to better characterize high frequency signals from both Earth and extragalactic sources, and serve as a precursor to future radio missions throughout the solar system. The antenna is composed of four 3 meter long tape spring elements that stow within a 100 mm x 100 mm x 22 mm volume and weigh less than 450 grams. All four elements are simultaneously released by the energization of a single hot knife mechanism and use strain energy to fully deploy. This is a significant departure from most large aperture satellite antennas which typically require a motor to control deployment. The antenna was designed, tested and built on a compressed schedule of less than a year and with a budget of less than half of what would be considered typical at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The system was successfully deployed on orbit, but science return was limited due to a persistent attitude perturbation likely caused by a solar-flutter phenomenon acting on the antenna elements.