PopHorn: A deployable folding horn antenna for low frequency space-based applications

不同形状和类型的无线电天线在不同的情况下是有用的。喇叭形天线特别适用于需要非常精确校准某些无线电仪器（例如射电望远镜）的情况。这使得喇叭天线在微波频率的许多不同应用中非常受欢迎，它们只需要几厘米（或几十厘米）宽。然而，在低频下，喇叭天线必须非常巨大才能以同样的方式工作。这种大尺寸限制了它们的实用性，特别是对于对有效载荷的尺寸和重量有限制性要求的天基应用。我们将开发一种折叠式天线，它可以被包装成一个相对较小和较轻的形式，适合连接到航天器上，但在部署时折叠成一个大喇叭天线形状，适合低频应用。这将使从太空进行低频非常高精度的无线电测量变得切实可行。

Different shapes and types of radio antennas are useful in different circumstances. Horn-shaped antennas are particularly good for when a very accurate calibration of some radio instrumentation (e.g. a radio telescope) is needed, for example. This makes horn antennas very popular for many different applications at microwave frequencies, where they only need to be a few centimetres (or tens of centimetres) across. At low frequencies, a horn antenna would have to be gigantic to work in the same way however. This large size limits their usefulness, particularly for space-based applications where there are restrictive requirements on size and weight of the payloads. We will develop a type of folding antenna that can be packaged up into a relatively small and lightweight form suitable for attaching to a spacecraft, but which folds out into a large horn antenna shape when deployed, suitable for low-frequency applications. This will make it practical to do very high precision radio measurements at low frequencies from space.