Dr. Nacer Chahat

"Pushing the Limits of Space Exploration One Antenna at a Time”

IEEE MTT/AP Orlando chapter, & Raj Mittra Distinguished Lecture Program

Date/time: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 (5:00 PM-6:00 PM)

SPEAKER: Dr. Nacer Chahat

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT:

Recent progress in antenna design and propagation modelling for Space Exploration will be discussed and illustrated through a wide range of on-going mission development at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Whether these antennas will be flying on small satellites venturing to Mars or studying Earth weather, or on the first planetary helicopter on Mars surface, or on a Lander searching for evidence of life on Europa, they all present very challenging constraints (volume, mass, harsh environment, etc.).

The NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has significantly contributed to the rapid growth of CubeSat antennas with the development of very innovative deployable antennas at X- and Ka-band. The Mars CubeSat One (MarCO) will benefit from a deployable X-band reflectarray to transmit back to Earth critical data from Insight during its Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) phase. A deployable Ka-band mesh reflector was developed for Raincube, the first radar in a CubeSat, scheduled for launch in early 2018. While CubeSats have their own challenges, larger satellites also come with their own difficulties. A Low Gain Antenna was designed for the Earth Science mission SWOT to achieve high-data-rate communication from LEO. As this telecommunication antenna is located in the vicinity of multiple instruments, the mitigation of multipath was the core challenge of this design. This talk will highlight these issues and provide solutions that we came up with. In addition, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently working on a Mars helicopter technology demonstration. The helicopter has the capability to transmit to and receive data from a Mars Rover located at a distance ranging from 250m to 1km. The link calculations and antenna designs will be addressed in this talk. Finally, the JPL’s antenna team is currently developing a new type of X-band telecommunication antenna for the Europa Lander searching for life on the icy moon of Jupiter. This antenna needs to survive extreme environment (extreme temperature and radiation levels) while being completely flat. This wide overview of missions and antenna developments aims at showing the different challenges antenna engineers have to face while designing antennas for space exploration.

BIOGRAPHY:

Dr. Nacer Chahat is a Senior Microwave RF engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He is also task manager of multiple Research and Development projects. He received two master degrees in Electrical Engineering (2009) and Telecommunication (2009) and a PhD in EE (2012) from University of Rennes, France. He has over ten years of experience in design, analysis, and development of antennas from UHF to THz frequencies for communications, RADAR, and imaging systems. He also specializesd in accurate EMI/EMC modeling for large Spacecrafts.

He is the EMI/EMC project system engineer and antenna Cognizant Engineer on the Surface Water Ocean and Topography (SWOT) mission. He is the antenna Cognizant Engineer and Telecom System Engineer on Mars helicopter development. He is leading the development of the high gain antenna for the Europa Lander. Since he joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he worked on several flight projects: Mars helicopter, Europa Lander, SWOT, NiSAR, MarCO, Nea Scout, Lunar Flashlight, RainCube, LunaH-map, Lunar IceCube, and BioSentinel. He has published more than 100 technical journal articles and conference papers, has written 4 book chapters, and holds 7 patents. He received 9 international and national awards, including the best PhD in France and French Early Career Award for Engineer and Scientist and the prestigious IEEE Sergei A. Schelkunoff Antenna Transaction Paper award in 2017.