An Imaging Reflector System with Reduced Scanning Aberrations

Imaging reflector systems, also known as magnified phased array antennas, combine the advantages of reflectors and arrays in one architecture. They are particularly attractive for satellite applications requiring a high number of beams with some reconfigurability capability. They are able to scan one beam electronically or to generate a multibeam coverage in a limited field of view. The caustics of this antenna system are analyzed adopting a geometrical optics procedure and a semi-deterministic phase compensation procedure is proposed for reducing the scanning aberrations.