Dr. G. Patrick Martin and Ms. Kathleen Minear receive NASA Headquarters Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medals for conception and demonstration of: Widely-Spaced Large Reflector Uplink Arraying with Real-Time Atmospheric Mitigation.
In September 2010, on a NASA HQ program Transmit Adaptive Combining Experiment (TxACE), the founders, Martin & Minear, successfully demonstrated widely-spaced transmit and calibrated receive arraying with real-time atmospheric mitigation and continual internal phase synchronization.
The system remained coherent within 0.2dB of theoretical (9.54dB) for the entire 6 months of operation. It was then powered down and the antennas moved to KSC. The three12 meter ground reflector antennas were about 60 meters apart which is about 2000 wavelengths at X-band.
The target was a GEO SAT, the DSCS B13. It was significantly inclined and at a low elevation angle. This enabled them to demonstrate a real-time atmospheric compensation capability that they had developed for higher frequencies such as Ka-band. The additional phase fluctuations due to the troposphere were significant and were successfully mitigated during this disturbance.
After the program ended, the antennas were shipped to KSC where teams from JPL and KSC used a combination of external source and manual calibration techniques. Ka-BOOM and Karnac were not operationally feasible systems. The antennas were taken down and stored in Huntsville, AL.
Martin & Minear’s Method was considered by NASA to be the only operationally feasible solution for simultaneous transmission from large widely-spaced ground reflectors.
NASA Headquarters: “IntelArrays’ principals (Martin & Minear) are the originators of and the only team in the world that has demonstrated operationally feasible, real-time radio frequency adaptive optics techniques.