Long-Life, High Accuracy Gyro-Stabilized Antenna Pointing System

Satellite Communication (SATCOM) is a precious warfighter resource. SATCOM often provides the only information medium capable of delivering required voice, imaging, and video information to military assets in deployed locations. Modern broadband SATCOM satellites, such as AEHF, include small high-gain steerable spot beams to deliver flexible coverage where needed in theater. Such spot-beam systems require antenna assemblies to be precision pointed to optimize system performance. The ability of the spacecraft bus and subsystems to provide stable antenna pointing therefore becomes of increasingly important. Next generation steerable spot beam antenna systems will need to operate for longer periods of time at higher frequencies (gains) and therefore will have increasingly narrow half-power beamwidth (HPBW) and very tight pointing accuracy requirements. To meet this need, advanced Gimbaled Dish Antennas (GDA) with increased pointing accuracy and improved reliability (longer life) will be required. Honeybee Robotics proposes to develop a two-axis active gyrostabilized gimbal system for long-life (> 20 year), high accuracy (total error < 0.005°) RF antenna pointing applications. The proposed effort will initially focus on developing a compact, cost-effective rate gyroscope that out performs comparable state-of-the-art gyros by an order of magnitude in accuracy and lifetime. The rate gyroscope is considered a key to success. BENEFIT: The benefit of the proposed development to the warfighter will be high reliability, high data rate broadband communications in remote regions not covered by fixed RF antenna assets. Commercial applications of the proposed development and its derivative products include commercial, military and intelligence broadband satellite, aircraft and other mobile high-gain antenna pointing applications.