Novel high peak power multi-function antennas for nanosats

Up-to-date intelligence is critical to mission success, tactically and strategically, but wide-area battlespace awareness remains elusive and very difficult to build. The difference between success and failure often hinges on having the right sensor in the right place at the right time. Our country spends millions of hours collecting airborne intelligence to understand the battlespace, but the Joint Force never has a full, up-to-date snapshot. Blind spots lead to gaps in understanding potential threats and prolong time in harm's way. Fighters, bombers, ISR platforms, and carriers are often sent to the wrong place at the wrong time due to the lack of comprehensive situational awareness. Understanding the entire battlespace remains a major challenge for the Joint Force, which is investing heavily in solving this problem. Many ideas offer incremental improvements in coverage, fidelity, frequency, or survivability, but only Array addresses all issues, simultaneously and comprehensively. Decision-makers typically must choose between coverage and resolution, but Array breaks this paradigm by providing wide-area, Very High Resolution (VHR) imaging with rapid revisit and a resilient, all-weather radar constellation.To image wide-area, VHR coverage from a resilient constellation, inexpensive cubesats will be arrayed in a distributed/collaborative formation to affect an enormous effective radar aperture. Each spacecraft is a unique antenna with transmit/receive capability and high bandwidth communications to download data to terrestrial terminals. The combination of these spacecraft works together to form a multi-kW constellation of peak power which enables the combination of high resolution and wide area coverage.  RADAR is typically done with a much larger antenna which means very few spacecrafts are on orbit, and they are large/expensive, and vulnerable to kinetic and non-kinetic attack.By launching a distributed constellation using high peak power antennas, this SBIR will show a different approach to space-based imaging by developing a significantly lower cost and higher performance distributed array constellation.