2003 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'03)
Evolutionary Design of an X-Band Antenna for NASA's Space Technology 5 Mission
Chicago, Illinois
July 09-July 11
ISBN: 0-7695-1977-6
We present an evolved X-band antenna design and flight prototype currently on schedule to be deployed on NASA's Space Technology 5 spacecraft in 2004. The mission consists of three small satellites that will take science measurements in Earth's magnetosphere. The antenna was evolved to meet a challenging set of mission requirements, most notably the combination of wide bandwidth for a circularly-polarized wave and wide bandwidth. Two genetic algorithms were used: one allowed branching in the antenna arms and the other did not. The highest performance antennas from both algorithms were fabricated and tested. A hand-designed antenna was produced by the contractor responsible for the design and build of the mission antennas. The hand-designed antenna is a quadrifilar helix, and we present performance data for comparison to the evolved antennas. As of this writing, one of our evolved antenna prototypes is undergoing flight qualification testing. If successful, the resulting antenna would represent the first evolved hardware in space, and the first deployed evolved antenna.
Citation:
Jason D. Lohn, Derek S. Linden, Gregory S. Hornby, William F. Kraus, Adaan Rodriguez-Arroyo, "Evolutionary Design of an X-Band Antenna for NASA's Space Technology 5 Mission," eh, pp.155, 2003 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'03), 2003