Advanced Antenna Design for a NASA Small Satellite Mission

Current methods of designing and optimizing antennas by hand are time and labor intensive, limit complexity, and require significant expertise and experience. Evolutionary design techniques can overcome these limitations by searching the design space and automatically finding effective solutions that would not ordinarily be found. In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have shown great promise in finding practical solutions in large, complex design spaces. We present our work in using evolutionary algorithms to automatically design X-band antennas for a NASA small satellite mission called Space Technology 5 (ST5). The highest performing antennas produced were fabricated and tests showed they outperformed a traditionally-designed antenna produced by the antenna contractor for the mission. Subsequent changes to the spacecraft orbit resulted in a change in requirements for the spacecraft antenna. By adjusting our algorithm we were able to rapidly re-evolve a new set of requirements-compliant antennas in less than a month. One of these new antenna designs was built, tested and approved for deployment on the three ST5 spacecraft, which were successfully launched into space on March 22, 2006. Our three evolved antennas performed flawlessly during the three-month mission. These evolved antennas are the first computer-evolved antenna designs to be deployed for any application and are the first computer-evolved hardware in space.