AAS 98-177

DEPLOYABLE ANTENNA TEST FACILITY WITH MAGNETICALLY SUSPENDED SLIDERS (MAGSUS SLIDERS)

Y. Horiuchi, T. Sugimoto - Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Japan; H. Tsunoda, Y. Kawakami - Advanced Space Communication Research Laboratory, Japan

Abstract

This paper describes an original deployable antenna test facility which provides precise on-ground evaluation of the antenna deployability using magnetically suspended sliders (MagSus Sliders). The MagSus Sliders system produces virtual micro-gravity environment and compensates the antenna weight without disturbing its 3-dimensional deployment motion. This system can be applied to the test facility for most of all deployable space structures, and enables us to evaluate their high precision deployability easily and repeatedly. Several deployment experiments on a mesh antenna partial model (real scale, 7m in diameter) show that this system is practical enough.

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