Performance Analysis of Passive Magnetic Pointing Method for Implementation of Directional Antennas on CubeSats

As CubeSats have become hugely popular in the recent years, the demand on their capability has also increased. As the missions and functionalities become more complex, coupled with the popular VHF and UHF bands becoming less accessible, CubeSats have been getting pushed into using higher frequency bands. For more capable CubeSats such as NASA and military satellites, utilization of S- and X-band communication have become a common place. While S- and X-band communication provide much higher data rate for the mission, the power and attitude control demand has also increased. Meeting this increased cost and demand on resources may not be feasible for university-level projects as attitude control systems can often cost more than the rest of the CubeSat. This research revisits passive magnetic pointing as an option for providing antenna pointing capability for CubeSats, enabling S- and X-band communication without requiring an active attitude control system. CubeSats can make contact with ground stations located at higher latitude to establish data link with directional antennas. The analyses shows that a higher data throughput can be achieved using S- and X-band communication over the traditional 9600 bps link with the proposed setup, without requiring active attitude control or deployable solar panels. The study characterizes the expected communication link performance for a typical 3U CubeSat when implementing the proposed communication architecture using a S- or X-band patch antenna taking into consideration the expected pointing performance and power generation capability of a 3U CubeSat.