A High-Performance Ka-Band Cryo-Cooled Receiver for Deep Space Applications

This paper describes the design of a ground station antenna feed system, that includes feed horn, polarizer, rejection filter, mono-pulse tracking coupler and low noise amplifiers with polarisation switching. The entire feed system assembly is cooled to cryogenic temperature in order to maximise the G/T of the ground station antenna. The cryogenic cooling system described is fully redundant and this novel design allows one cryocooler to be removed and replaced, while the other cryocooler is still running. The design has been submitted for patent protection.