Design of a resonant edge-slot waveguide array for the Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer (LRR)

Author

Gosselin, R.B. ; Seufert, S.E. ; Dod, L.R.

Author_Institution

Microwave Instrum. Technol. Branch, NASA Goddard Splace Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

Volume

1

fYear

2003

fDate

21-25 July 2003

Firstpage

509

Abstract

Several X-band resonant edge-slot waveguide arrays were designed and fabricated for the passive X-band radiometer being flown on the NASA Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer (LRR) aircraft mission. The advantage of this antenna for aperture synthesis between adjacent linear arrays is described along with detailed description of a modern technique for designing resonant edge-slot waveguide arrays. What made this achievement most noteworthy was this historically difficult design was accomplished at very low cost without manufacturing any hardware prototypes and the antenna was very well-optimized. This paper summarizes the development effort, and present engineering design curves used to create this low-sidelobe antenna design and data measured from the radiometer antenna.

Keywords

atmospheric measuring apparatus; radiometers; rain; remote sensing; slot antenna arrays; LRR aircraft mission; Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer; X-band waveguide array; adjacent linear arrays; aperture synthesis; edge-slot waveguide array; engineering design curves; hardware prototypes; low-sidelobe antenna design; passive X-band radiometer; radiometer antenna; resonant waveguide array; Aircraft manufacture; Aperture antennas; Costs; Hardware; Linear antenna arrays; Manufacturing; NASA; Optical arrays; Radiometry; Resonance;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2003. IGARSS '03. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7929-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2003.1293825

Filename

1293825