Effects of Surface Errors of Antennas on Detection Performance of Space VLBI

This work investigates the effects of the surface errors of the satellite antenna on the detection performance of the space VLBI system. First, the relationship between the surface errors and the antenna gain loss is analyzed, and then the influence of the gain loss on the detection performance of the VLBI system is analyzed. Both the uniform and nonuniform distributions of errors are studied, and the second-order Taylor expansion is performed on the errors to simplify the calculation. When the errors distribute nonuniformly, the solver SCIP is adopted to solve the corresponding distribution, which leads to the maximum gain loss of the antenna. Taking the VLBI system with two base stations as the object, and each station’s radio telescope is a hoop truss deployable antenna with 30 m aperture, the effects of antenna gain loss on the detection capability of the radio telescope and the delay error of the VLBI system are studied. The study of extreme working conditions will have a higher guiding significance for the overall link analysis of practical projects.