This is an obscure type of antenna, called sometimes cigar antenna, that works pretty much like Yagi - most of you will know it as (non-satellite) TV antenna - but instead of rods it has disks. It was used in Lunokhod 1 and 2, Soviet moon rovers launched in 1970 and 1973 respectively
Where was that picture taken? Looks like a cool museum I’d like to add to my bucket list.
Edit: Did a quick reverse image search, and it’s apparently the NPO Lavochkin museum in Moscow. Also seems to be an old photo. The museum has been renovated since and looks much, much nicer now. https://www.leonarddavid.com/take-a-virtual-tour-russian-museum-of-cosmonautics/
i’ve lifted this photo from linked page, which elaborates on these antennas in detail
Were there any specific benefits to the discs other than that it looked cool?
Yeah - electrically, antenna has broader bandwidth, and mechanically, it’s harder to ding it. Broader bandwidth also means that tolerances aren’t that critical. Downside is increased weight and wind loading
This specific antenna was used for video downlink, which requires comparatively large bandwidth
Additionally, for frequencies that were practical at that time you can’t use simple Yagi, because this would mean choppy signal. Instead you need circular polarization - and that requires either crossed pairs of rods, but this is narrowband, or rings, but this is flimsy and still narrowband but not as badly, or disks. You could ditch these elements entirely and use long helix only (bottom part but extended) but helix has quickly diminishing returns - this design takes good properties of both of these
So the principle is: If the design of your antenna is such that when the signal emitted by one disc reaches the next disc some nanoseconds later, the phases line up (the next disc is adding power because it’s exactly in sync with the signal coming off the first disc), each disc will progressively reinforce the signal so the emitted signal adds up to be way more powerful in the exact direction that the antenna is pointed. And likewise for receiving from that specific direction.
Yagi antennas use the same principle, and another poster gave a much more technical explanation of why discs instead of a Yagi or helix, but in case you were asking the more basic question, that’s why.
Thanks for the Eli5!!
I must be a retarded 5 yo
you can think of these disks or rods or whatever (collectively) as a kind of lens that makes signal stick to these elements - but only if it arrives from front. then all that signal falls on an actual radiating element in the back of antenna. this works only for some range of wavelengths - in general, the more volume this kind of antenna occupies, the bigger this range is
here’s how electric fields look like in yagi antenna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgSstok3Vjc
