UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION OF THE GAIN BUDGET FOR INCUS

INCUS (INvestigation of Convective UpdraftS) is an Earth Science project approved by NASA in 2022. The goal of the mission is to study in detail how water vapor and droplets move inside tropical storms and thunderstorms and understand their effects on weather and climate models. To carry out this study, the mission will use three almost identical SmallSats, each one equipped with a Ka-band radar heritage of Raincube. The deployable mesh reflector antenna is a new 1.6m design provided by Tendeg. The bus for each of the three observatories is provided by Blue Canyon Technology (BCT), while Colorado State University leads the science team of the project. This paper presents the general architecture of the three observatories with particular emphasis on the radar antenna subsystem design. In particular, a statistical analysis to evaluate the impact of fabrication tolerances of the deployable mesh reflector surface and their effect on the antenna gain will be presented.