Satellite built by Calgary students expected to launch into space this fall

About a hundred University of Calgary students—most of them undergraduates—have been using their spare time on an impressive project.

Some students at the University of Calgary are using their free time to create a satellite that’s scheduled to launch into the upper atmosphere this year.

“It’s such a neat experience to get to work on her hands-on team like this, actually creating something that gets to go to space,” said U of C student Meagan Davies.

Students started the Calgary To Space team in 2020, and are doing final testing on FrontierSat (also known as CubeSat) before it boards a SpaceX Falcon9 in the fall.

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“[We’re] preparing it to do vibration testing, so we want to see that it can withstand the conditions of being in rocket as they launch it to space,” Davies said.

The satellite is roughly the size of a loaf of bread and will orbit about 500 kilometres above earth, taking images, collecting data and testing a boom – a little arm that unrolls like a party blower.

“[We’ll] see how the boom unfurls and also get some pretty cool pictures of the boom with Earth in the background,” said U of C student Aarti Chandiramani.

Imaging of the ionosphere could provide insight about a recently discovered phenomenon known as the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE).

STEVE creates purple and green ribbons of light in the night sky, similar to the aurora borealis.

“We have instrumentation on FrontierSat to study the plasma space environment, to measure how it moves, so in a way it’s kind of like a high-tech windsock,” said Johnathan Burchill, an assistant professor of transdisciplinary space science and aerospace technology with the department of physics and astronomy

Burchill is planning to do a research paper with data collected by the students’ satellite.

“I’m very excited to see our satellite be a part of a research paper,” said U of C student Yuki Zhou. “I’m very excited to see it’s going to be actually published to the public and shared to the other researchers.”

The Calgary To Space team says its project will be the first satellite built by Calgary students to launch into space.

“This is the first one for Calgary, so we’re really excited to start that trend and get Calgary a little access point to space,” Chandiramani said.

The approximately 100 students involved (most of them undergraduates from Schulich School of Engineering and the Faculty of Science) spend a lot of time working on the project outside pf class; some even work full-time on FrontierSat in-between semesters.

Building a device to send data from space is only part of the challenge.

The students also had to raise about $200,000 and navigate federal and international regulations.

“Space is so expensive that generally a lot of people are cut out of it completely,” Chandiramani said. “But as more and more teams stand-up and we commercialize space a little bit more, projects like CubeSat become a lot more feasible, which means that students like us get lucky opportunities to send something space.”

Final details are still being determined by SpaceX, but some of the students are planning to watch their creation launch in-person.

“If I have the opportunity to go to the US and see the actual launch, it’s going be very exciting,” said Zhou.