Towards Holographic Beam-Forming Metasurface Technology for Next Generation CubeSats

Abstract

We present the concept of holographic beam forming metasurface antenna for CubeSat platforms at X-band frequencies. The proposed metasurface topology exhibits a flat-panel system layout, particularly desirable for integration with CubeSat platforms without a hardware-intense deployment mechanism for launch. It is shown that appropriately interacting the guided-mode (or reference-wave) with a metasurface layer makes it possible to realize the radiation pattern of interest as an objective function - similar to an optical hologram - without the need for dedicated phase shifting circuits. The full-wave simulations of the designed metasurface layer integrated with a 1U CubeSat reveals a high-fidelity beam-control with an aperture efficiency greater than 40% at 10 GHz operating frequency.