Rocket experiment on microwave power transmission with Furoshiki deployment

摘要

Huge antennas has many useful applications in space as well as on the ground, for example, Solar Power Satellite to provide electricity to the ground, telecommunication for cellular phones, radars for remote sensing, navigation and observation, and so on. The S-310-36 sounding rocket was successfully launched on 22 January 2006 to verify our newly proposed scheme to construct huge antennas under microgravity condition in space. The rocket experiment has three main objectives, the first objective of which is to verify the Furoshiki deployment system [S. Nakasuka, R. Funase, K. Nakada, N. Kaya, J. Mankins, Large membrane "FUROSHIKI Satellite" applied to phased array antenna and its sounding rocket experiment, in: Proceedings of the 54th International Astronautical Congress, 2003. [1]], the second is to test the retrodirective antenna system to correct the distortion of the structures in a long range from space to the ground as mentioned above and the last is a microgravity test of the crawling robots on the deployed mesh. The payload section is composed of four sections. The mesh is installed at the top section and the two robots are in the box at the second section under the mesh. The daughter sections at the third section are attached to the mother section, while the momentum wheel is stored in the bottom section. The telemeters and the timer are in the CI section under the payload one. The three sections above the daughter ones are covered by a nose cone.rnThe rocket motor was separated from the payload section to reduce the momentum of the payload, while the nose cone was released after the launch. The payload section was precisely stopped to spin by the momentum wheel for the deployment of the mesh. The mesh would be tangled in case the spinning of the payload section could not perfectly be stopped. The three daughter sections were separated by springs to deploy the mesh installed on the top of the mother section. The daughter sections might be bounced toward the mother section without a position control. Therefore the daughter section had a gas jet to stop the rebound and keep the strength of the mesh.rnThe microwave transmitters were turned on to radiate the microwave toward the ground according to the pilot signal transmitted from the ground station. These transmitters had a retrodirective antenna system to control precisely the direction of the microwave toward the transmitting antenna of the pilot signal. The retrodirective antenna system can decide the output phases of the microwave by conjugating the received phases of the pilot signal.rnThe two robots started to crawl toward the separated daughter sections on the mesh after the deployment.