Antenna Designs for CubeSat-Borne Continuous-Waveform Radar

CubeSat-borne radar has many potential applications in space exploration, including tracking, imaging, and weather prediction. A continuous-waveform radar has advantages of compact size and low power consumption, making it suitable to implement on small platforms such as CubeSats. This paper presents power budget analysis that sets the required isolation between the transmitter and receiver. The presented approach is to integrate oppositely polarized antennas on two deployed solar panels to minimize the interference. The prototyped antennas are tested on a 6U CubeSat frame and the results show more than 40 dB isolation, satisfying the power budget requirements.