Dual-Band Circularly Polarized Shared Aperture Antenna for CubeSat Communication System

For space exploration, a special class of small satellite known as CubeSat, has become popular in academia and industry in recent years. Due to its low cost and short development time, researchers prefer CubeSat over large-scale satellites wherever possible. In academia, CubeSat has major applications in the field of space atmosphere, space-to-ground communication, weather forecasting, etc. Like other spacecrafts, CubeSat uses multiple antennas in different frequency bands to establish a communication link with ground stations. Recent CubeSat missions are generating a large amount of data which cannot be downlinked using conventional antennas. The demand for a compact antenna system that can operate in multiple frequency bands and provide high gain and large bandwidth is high. This thesis work proposes the use of shared aperture antennas with multiple radiating elements sharing one dielectric structure for CubeSat. The lower band element of the antenna operates at S-band/GPS frequency and the higher band element operates at X-band. Additional dielectric material is added to the antenna structure to increase the gain, bandwidth, and beamwidth of the proposed antennas. The antennas show excellent performance in terms of bandwidth, axial ratio, and gain compared to other shared aperture antennas reported for CubeSats