Characteristics of a high gain and light weight radial line slot antenna with honeycomb structure in 32GHz band for data link in space exploration

A light weight and very high gain radial line slot antenna (RLSA) for space exploration is designed, fabricated and characterized at 32GHz. More than 25000 slots are spirally arranged on the metal top plate with the uniform distribution over the aperture of 900mm diameter. The use of the honeycomb as the spacer in the parallel plate is indispensable because of its lightweight and compactness, though at 32GHz, this material is considerably lossy and also anisotropic if the cell size is too coarse.