SBIR-STTR Award

Data transport between space platforms and Earth is vital to NASA mission success as well as commercial enterprises ranging from remote sensing to satellite-based television, radio, or data services. Throughput and data capture in all cases is subject to the availability and performance of ground network equipment—commonly a parabolic antenna. Efficiency across designs of parabolic antennas is typically in the 50-60% range due to a variety of losses, resulting in a loss of roughly half its theoretical potential to send and receive signals. Our proposed innovation is the application of a metasurface lens which augments the performance of the antenna by compensating for the phase and amplitude errors, engineering a medium with specific refractive indices at specific points on its surface. Metamaterials, composed of periodic subwavelength metal/dielectric structures that resonantly couple to the electric and/or magnetic components of the incident electromagnetic fields, exhibit negative and near-zero refractive indices to correct for phase and amplitude errors. A metasurface lens, created from a single-layer or minimal-layer stack of planar metamaterial structures with subwavelength thickness, can introduce a spatially varying electromagnetic response, molding wavefronts into shapes that can be designed at will, correcting the phase and amplitude response of a signal. The metasurface antenna lens is expected to result in efficiencies of 80-80% or greater depending on the antenna design. In this Phase I effort the material characteristics required for the textile metasurface will be determined through analyses, as will the approach for mounting, installation, and integration of both a textile and planar lens. Performance will be characterized through modeling and simulation. The result of the effort will be an analysis and simulation-based recommendation for a prototype design and its expected performance. Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): Application of the Parabolic Antenna Lens (PAL) to NASA ground terminal antennas and supporting commercial service providers has direct benefit to communications performance for missions. PAL can be beneficial across the full spectrum of NASA projects and missions, but may be most impactful for missions working to overcome the challenges of communicating from deep space distances. NASA could apply this innovation to existing ground terminals, without investing in new expensive infrastructure. Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): Two non-NASA markets utilize antennas which could benefit from PAL: (1) consumer equipment, and (2) the network infrastructure market. In the consumer equipment market, satellite TV or internet subscribers are target customers, motivated by a desire for uninterrupted access to content. For network infrastructure users, reliable data access represents a positive impact to revenues. Duration: 6

Parabolic antennas are commonly used at satellite ground terminals to support applications such as data delivery from science and imagery satellites, direct-to-home broadcasting, internet to underserved areas, and business connectivity because of their performance to price ratio. The performance, or efficiency, of parabolic antennas used at most ground stations worldwide is sub-optimal. Two dominant losses which reduce antenna efficiency are illumination loss and spill-over loss, and both manifest as an impact to the phase and amplitude distribution of an electromagnetic signal at the antenna’s surface. Improving the efficiency of existing parabolic antennas without significantly increasing their price is highly desirable as the additional gain realized by the antenna translates to improved data throughput or a decrease in the size, weight, and power (SWaP) burden on the user spacecraft or the main ground terminal without the installation of entirely new antennas. Current solutions to improve efficiency of antennas are expensive as they require the redesign of components such as antenna feeds or even complete replacement of an existing antenna system with a new one. Teltrium’s innovation is a Parabolic Antenna Lens (PAL) that improves the performance of parabolic antennas by using metasurfaces composed of periodic subwavelength metal/dielectric structures that resonantly couple to the electric and/or magnetic components of the incident electromagnetic fields to reduce losses that impact antenna efficiency by compensating for non-uniformities in the phase of the electromagnetic signal received or transmitted by the antenna. Two solutions will be prototyped: a horn-mount PAL that has a small metasurface in front of an antenna’s horn feed to reduce spill-over loss, and a top-mount PAL that has a metasurface placed on top of a parabolic antenna to reduce illumination loss. These two type of PALs will be integrated into COTS Ku-band antennas and performance tested. Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): The PAL innovation has the most direct near-term benefit to ground station terminals that provide communications services to space users. Improving the efficiency of existing antennas is a cost-effective way to gain performance that is relevant to NASA. PAL will help improve the performance of ground antennas used to support NASA spacecraft, particularly as new mission challenges drive higher communications performance. Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words): Applications of the PAL innovation to commercial satellite ground stations are similar to those for NASA ground terminals. Commercial ground antennas including ground stations, teleports, VSATs and Direct-to-Home terminals segment can achieve improved performance with PAL, thus increasing data throughput capabilities of such systems and positively impacting business results. Duration: 24