New Aerogel-Based, Conformal Antenna to Boost Aircraft Performance

Researchers from four NASA  centers have collaborated on the creation of a new lightweight, conformal antenna to boost aircraft performance. The antenna is made of aerogels, which have resulted in a thin, flexible antenna substrate with improved gain, bandwidth, and efficiency. It is designed with a new commercial phased array chipset to enable a small-size, low-power solution for beyond line-of-sight communications on small- to medium-scale unmanned aircraft systems. The conformal antenna is designed to minimize drag to gain efficiency compared to a conventional satellite dish. It is made of 64 small antennas that combine to perform the function of one large antenna.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] >>We're developing a conformal antenna. We're looking to transition off of larger, traditional antennas that may have a very large volume and require a gimbal to move it around to point at different, say, satellites, for communications. This particular antenna is a multi-center collaboration. It was designed at NASA Glenn in Cleveland, on-aircraft modeling of the antenna's performance done at NASA Langley, preflight planning done at NASA Ames, and then finally we had integration done at NASA Armstrong. The antenna is made up of sixty-four little antennas that combine to perform the function

00:00:49 of a much larger antenna; that allows us to generate steering of the beam as well as minimize interference with ground users, to form interesting pattern characteristics that are hard to obtain with a traditional antenna. And making use of this light-weight aerogel material, this is nearly ninety-five percent air and allows us to have a very efficient antenna for generating our communication signals. [Background noise] >>It's ready to go. [Airplane revving up, taking off] >>Our climb card is complete, setting up for Run One then. And turning inbound for the first run, are you guys ready?

00:01:43 [Background chatter] >>Copy altitude verified. [Background chatter] >>We're actively taking a run which allows us to measure the antenna pattern characteristics so that we can verify that the antenna is functioning correctly but also see how much interference that this is causing for ground-based systems.