Textile Antennas for Space Environment

Abstract

This presentation will discuss design and testing of a textile patch antenna for extreme space environments to support the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU). The xEMU Project is responsible for the design and delivery of an Exploration-class space suit, which will be demonstrated on the International Space Station (ISS), with future extensibility to missions in cislunar orbit and on the lunar surface. In an effort to reduce mass and volume while increasing redundancy, two textile UHF antenna will be placed on the xEMU, replacing the current single UHF antenna on the EMU. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the challenges with designing and certifying textile antennas for extreme space environments and the solutions we have implemented to address them.