Mechanical design of advanced shaped gridded reflectors for space applications

British Aerospace has over 20 years experience in the mechanical design and manufacture of advanced antenna reflectors for space applications and has to date, designed and manufactured over 90 such reflectors. The most significant being the low distortion C-band reflectors for INTELSAT VI and more recently the qualification of advanced shaped reflectors as part of an ESA study carried out by Fox et al. (1989). The detailed knowledge gained from these two programmes together with the company´s wide experience in mechanical design/analysis of composite structures has enabled the development of advanced shaped gridded reflectors to meet the requirements of the ORION programme. The paper will describe the key aspects of the mechanical design that have been developed in order to realise this new type of reflector in addition to meeting the very stringent distortion and mass requirements. In addition the key development of an advanced new sunshield system and deployment trimming mechanisms are addressed. It concludes with a short hardware status summary