Preliminary beam-waveguide design of the novel ESA deep-space antenna DSA3

This paper presents the feasibility study of the beam-waveguide (BWG) system of the third deep-space antenna of ESA (DSA3), which is planned to be built in the Americas. The main challenge of this design consists in combining the X band (7.145-8.5 GHz) and the Ka band downlink channel (31.8-32.3 GHz), already operating in the existing DSA2, with the new receiving band, namely the K band, ranging from 25.5 GHz to 27 GHz, recently allocated for deep-space missions. Due to its large bandwidth, the K band will allow for adopting a considerably higher bit-rate to download scientific data from the space probe.