2020•Unpublished venueRequires access
Mars Cube One
Nacer E. Chahat, Emmanuel Decrossas, M. Michael Kobayashi
Open publisher page 3 citations
Abstract
The limited mass and volume available in a CubeSat present a tremendous design challenge. This challenge needed to be solved even before thinking of sending any CubeSat to Deep Space and to enable the first interplanetary CubeSat mission: Mars Cube One (MarCO). This chapter provides detailed information on the antenna development at X-band and UHF that made this mission possible. In order to fill the needs of deep-space communications and navigation for CubeSats and small satellites, the Iris V1 Deep-Space Transponder was developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory starting with the interplanetary nanospacecraft pathfinder in relevant environment “first CubeSat to deep space” mission. MarCO essentially communicates at X-band with the DSN stations and all antennas are optimized across the deep-space frequency bands. Before presenting the original deployable UHF antenna, a brief state-of-the-art is presented showing all antenna concepts available in the literature at the time MarCO development started.