It’s a space race, university-style.
Science and engineering students across Canada are setting their sights on the final frontier. Their two-year mission: build a small operational satellite using off-the-shelf components capable of conducting scientific research while orbiting the Earth.
The winning team in the inaugural Canadian Satellite Design Challenge will see their satellite launched into space, where it will remain in orbit for at least a year.
The competition, which began in September 2010, is the first national contest for university students that offers a crack at space exploration. Teams from 12 universities are involved, but a recent review of the designs at the Canadian Space Agency’s Ottawa facility put three teams in the lead.
The satellites, known as CubeSats, are about the size of a thin shoe box and are small enough to piggyback on rockets launched for other space exploration missions.
The brainchild of self-confessed space geek and engineer Larry Reeves, the contest, run by a non-profit organization with cooperation from industry, academia and government, aims to launch the winning craft from either the U.S., India or Russia after final judging takes place in October.
“Engineering students do some amazing projects,” said Reeves, referring to competitions to build solar-powered cars, super-mileage cars and even NASA’s space elevator. “The complexity of these satellites is no worse than some of the other engineering that goes on in the solar cars and such. I really thought these could be within the grasp of university students.”
Here’s a look at the top three teams vying to blast off into space:
• Concordia University
This 30-student team, led by third-year computer engineering student Nick Sweet, wants to send its satellite into space to study the Van Allen radiation belt, a zone of charged particles called plasma trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field.
Specifically, the team wants to focus on the South Atlantic Anomaly, an area over top of Brazil in which the Van Allen radiation belt intersects with the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The main goal is to get a better understanding of the anomaly, how it works, what its rate of growth is and what trace gases are up there,” explained Sweet, 25. “It’s important for space weather research because there’s actually a large amount of interaction between the weather out in space and the weather on Earth.”
• University of Manitoba
Can living organisms survive a trip through space from one planet to another?
That’s what the satellite design team from the University of Manitoba is hoping to find out. By loading a colony of tiny organisms called tardigrades onto their satellite, the students want to find out if life can survive the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space. A tiny camera will chart the organisms’ progress and relay images back to Earth.
“We want to revive them in space, watch them grow, move towards a food source and reproduce,” said team leader Dario Schor, 27, a graduate student in computer engineering. “This is fairly ambitious. It hasn’t been done in a satellite of this scale ever before.”
• University of Saskatchewan
Global positioning systems have been known to give inaccurate readings from time to time, especially at higher latitudes and near the equator.
The 40-member University of Saskatchewan team wants to gain a better understanding of why this occurs by setting up transmitters on the ground and relaying signals to its satellite.
“If you have enough of these ground stations around the world, you can map what’s going on in the ionosphere and how your space environment is affected by incoming solar radiation,” said Aarya Shahsavar, 20, president of the school’s design team and a third-year engineering physics student. “A better understanding of that will help us improve things like GPS.
75,000: estimated development cost, in dollars, of the University of Manitoba satellite
350,000: estimated development cost, in dollars, of the University of Saskatchewan satellite
9: number of computer engineers working on Concordia University’s satellite
26,280: speed, in kilometres per hour, at which the satellites will orbit the Earth
100: time, in minutes, for the satellites to complete one orbit around the Earth
700: approximate altitude, in kilometres, the satellites will reach
Source: University of Manitoba, Concordia University, and University of Saskatchewan satellite design teams