Design, Fabrication and Measurements of an X-Band Cross-Patch Antenna with Metasurface for Advanced LEO CubeSat Missions

In this research, we build, miniaturize, and optimize a smart metasurface antenna to meet the requirements of the smallest cube satellite unit with almost negligible air drag altitude. One of the main objectives of this study is to extend the AeroCube lifetime by adopting far orbits and obtaining significant HPBW angles in order to increase the data reception period throughout the day while using a very efficient energy system. To accomplish all of this, a new antenna shape was adopted, consisting of planar dipole antennas perpendicular to each other, to minimize size to the greatest extent possible while maintaining good operating characteristics in accordance with all previous objectives, without the need for any antenna deployment process after the satellite reaches orbit. Furthermore, a completely new unit cell shape was adopted and optimized to create the metasurface layer, allowing for further enhancement of the final X-band antenna characteristics and, as a result, the overall efficiency of the completed cube satellite. The designed metasurfaced antenna was well manufactured and validated in the anechoic chamber and using vector network analyzer, yielding satisfactory measured results in X-band for CubeSat communication. It is lightweight and exhibit unidirectional radiation pattern with wide 3 dBi gain bandwidth (3 dBi GBW of about 1.0 GHz) and high gain of about 10.0 dBi at 8.4 GHz. The overall results with occupied size and volume are satisfactory for unlimited lifetime CubeSat missions at X-band using all CubeSat structures.