Hardware Development of Dimensionally-Stable Articulated Deployable Mast

In SAR and radar interferometric altimeter instruments, the transmit / receiving antennas are separated as far apart as possible to increase resolution in the signal. This requires a stiff and dimensionally stable deployable mast to provide the necessary length between the two radar antennas. Deployable mast length is constrained by available stowage volume, spacecraft platform attitude control constraints (such as deployed frequency) and the requirement for high stability under on-orbit thermal environments and accelerations. AEC-ABLE has developed the ADAM (ABLE Deployable Articulated Mast) as an innovative solution for providing this deployable and extremely stable structure. ABLE has also developed a novel ADAM variation (the ¿stiff-soft¿ design) that uses stiff rods as one set of diagonals in the face of each bay of the mast. These stiff rods have the benefit of greatly increasing shear and torsional stiffness of the mast as well as having low CTE relative to metallic cables, which are the conventional ¿soft¿ diagonals used for the ADAM. Further development of this unique and enabling design is proposed here: specifically; to develop and run a kinematic model that will help alleviate primary concerns with this design ¿ demonstration of proper stowage and deployment kinematics of the stiff-soft ADAM design.