Cost Effective Operationally Responsive Ku-Band Antenna (CORKUBA)

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a powerful information gathering tool that can provide high-resolution imagery day or night and through cloud over. Microsatellites have the capability of providing low-cost, robust global coverage, but to date have not had the antenna technology needed to perform meaningful SAR missions.Physical Sciences and their partners will apply their membrane antenna technology to the high-payoff challenge of deploying a SAR antenna on orbit from a microsatellite platform. The team will size the antenna for a militarily relevant SAR mission with the associated parameters of gain, bandwidth, power output and side lobe levels. The proposed program will develop the actual flight hardware and, under proposed options, integrate the antenna with the rest of the payload electronics and the parent spacecraft.Flight demonstration of this technology will enable a wide variety of tactical and strategic assets to be deployed on orbit. An operational system utilizing this antenna would be capable of performing both imaging and MTI missions.