Design and Development of Deployment Mechanism for 3.6m Umbrella Type Space Deployable Antenna Reflector

This work is part of a project for development of space deployable antenna designs for Prime Focus and Cassegrain configurations. This paper presents couple of feasible design concepts of 3.6m aperture antenna deployment in space. Experimental work carried-out on various test setups is presented. Based on these experiments the advantages, constraints etc. of each presented concept is discussed with respect to overall mass, cost, functionality and other such mission essential objectives. Performance and surface measurements of a realized full-scale engineering model is also presented.