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The most significant shortfall in countering the super-fast weapons threat is gaps in sensor coverage for persistent birthto-death target tracking. The Department of Defense Space Development Agency’s is a notional architecture proposed to consist of massive numbers of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to detect and track multiple hypersonic weapons and ballistic missiles [1]. This paper presents a trade study analysis of a rectangular flexible foldout phased array antenna structure to support the detection and tracking of these weapons from multiple LEO constellations. Potential integration of the array into a solar panel structure, for improved cost and launch mass properties, will introduce several positional error sources, both correlated (sinusoidal) and random in nature. These deformations can have a major impact on performance including antenna gain, sidelobes (peak, RMS), angle accuracy, and pointing error. These degradations can result in reduced detections and increased false targets, which stresses overall system performance.
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