Origami deployable reflector antenna for cubesats

Compact, deployable reflector antennas on CubeSats are now a key enabling technology for many telecommunication and scientific missions. This paper presents a novel concept for center-fed deployable reflector antennas for CubeSat using carbon-fiber reinforced elastomer materials and origami techniques for doubly-curved surfaces, called the roll-ribs reflector concept. The origami design methodology and the reflector concept optimization process are illustrated through the design of a 0.5 m, Ka-band front-fed Cassegrain reflector antenna folding into 1.3 U, with a deployable origami reflector and a deployable subreflector. The reflector antenna concept presented in this paper uses the FlexRS® materials family developed by Large Space Structures GmbH, and the origami folding methodology is coined OriFlex®. A demonstrator is built and tested for folding and deployment, and RF performance.