Miniaturized Transparent Slot Antenna for 1U and 2U CubeSats: CRTS Space Missions

In this paper, a transparent parasitic slot antenna is proposed for 1U and 2U CubeSats. The proposed antenna is low profile and present physical size suitable for all CubeSat configurations. Moreover, the proposed study introduces a tradeoff between two electromagnetic/ Satellite aims. The first one is about space for the CubeSat solar panels, which is preferred to be wide for producing the maximum energy possible. The second is about the use of CubeSat top face for increasing the antenna peak gain at X-band. The proposed parasitic slot antenna is designed and optimized using ANSYS HFSS and Quasi Newtonian method. The obtained results show that the antenna gain is increased by about 7.0 dBi and 8.0 dBi for both 1U and 2U CubeSats, respectively. In addition to that, the proposed antenna gives large impedance bandwidth of about 600 MHz at X-Band. In general, the constructed transparent slot antenna with parasitic elements mounted on both 1U / 2U CubeSat box presents high antenna performances that make it very candidate for unlimited lifetime CubeSat Communication.