These Ontario students helped develop a satellite that’ll soon join a SpaceX launch in Florida | 24CA News
McMaster University’s first space-bound satellite tv for pc is scheduled to affix a SpaceX shuttle launch in Florida subsequent week.
The NEUDOSE undertaking was developed over eight years, involving greater than 150 college students, employees and alumni on the Hamilton college. The satellite tv for pc is scheduled to be launched into Earth’s decrease orbit on Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. ET.
The aim is to assemble info on area radiation, to review its results on the human physique.
“I think everyone’s got butterflies and are super excited after all this time,” mentioned Andrei Hanu, a professor of physics and astronomy and co-principal investigator of the undertaking.
“It was crunch time for us the last couple of months, but now everyone is excited to take all of this in.”
NEUDOSE — quick for Neutron Dosimetry and Exploration — is a mini-satellite that is solely 20 centimetres excessive. It’s designed to gather knowledge exterior the Earth’s environment that can detect and measure the quantity of area radiation.
Scientists hope to grasp the dangers astronauts face with extended publicity in area.
The satellite tv for pc is at the moment on the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, ready to be loaded onto the SpaceX shuttle. A command centre has been arrange on the McMaster campus, within the Information Technology Building, to obtain knowledge from NEUDOSE.
Hanu instructed CBC Hamilton he hoped to affix greater than 20 members of the undertaking for the launch in Florida on Tuesday.
“I hope not to cry too much,” Hanu mentioned in a news launch.
From idea to area
Hanu mentioned the inspiration for such an bold undertaking got here from his experiences on the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2014. He was working as a analysis scientist and attended a convention on NASA’s new Space Launch System — which shall be its strongest rocket to be constructed, in keeping with the company.
“I was blown away. I couldn’t believe that American students and researchers had these opportunities that we didn’t have in Canada,” he mentioned. “I said, ‘I want to do this with a university in Canada.'”
Hanu mentioned that when he returned to McMaster, he spent a month designing a tough idea and introduced ahead the proposal — labelled “Do you want to build a satellite?” — on Jan. 31, 2015.
It’s one of 15 initiatives chosen to be funded by way of the Canadian CubeSat Project in 2017, the place they started to obtain monetary assist from the Canadian Space Agency and Ontario energy supplier Bruce Power.
‘Written on the backs of napkins’
Daniel Tajik has a doctorate in electromagnetics and radio-frequency engineering from McMaster and labored totally on the bottom station system housed on campus.
He mentioned in an interview that he was proud how an extracurricular undertaking “written on the backs of napkins” was now going into area.
“It started off as a PhD project and this sort of dream to build something really big,” he mentioned.
He mentioned many college students who labored on the undertaking went to pursue careers at totally different area corporations and he is blissful he was a part of an essential undertaking.
“We all had our little parts to play in putting it together, but I’m happy that something I helped work on and held in my hands is going to float in space, even if it’s only gonna float there for maybe a year.”
Everyone who took half within the undertaking had their names laser-etched onto the plates of the satellite tv for pc.
Aaron Pitcher, a fourth-year McMaster PhD pupil in electrical and pc engineering, joined the undertaking in 2016. He is now the senior techniques lead.
He referred to as it a beneficial expertise, and hopes extra college students will come by way of this system and develop into a part of future initiatives.
“It’s been an absolutely outstanding project to be a part of. I honestly become speechless when I talk about putting something in space at this point in my career.”
