McMaster students set for Florida launch of their satellite, after developing it for years
CBC
McMaster University's first space-bound satellite is scheduled to join a SpaceX shuttle launch in Florida next week.
The NEUDOSE project was developed over eight years, involving more than 150 students, staff and alumni at the Hamilton university. The satellite is scheduled to be launched into Earth's lower orbit on Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. ET.
The goal is to gather information on space radiation, to study its effects on the human body.
"I think everyone's got butterflies and are super excited after all this time," said Andrei Hanu, a professor of physics and astronomy and co-principal investigator of the project.
"It was crunch time for us the last couple of months, but now everyone is excited to take all of this in."
NEUDOSE — short for Neutron Dosimetry and Exploration — is a mini-satellite that's only 20 centimetres high. It's designed to collect data outside the Earth's atmosphere that will detect and measure the amount of space radiation.
Scientists hope to understand the risks astronauts face with prolonged exposure in space.
The satellite is currently at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, waiting to be loaded onto the SpaceX shuttle. A command centre has been set up on the McMaster campus, in the Information Technology Building, to receive data from NEUDOSE.
Hanu told CBC Hamilton he hoped to join more than 20 members of the project for the launch in Florida on Tuesday.
"I hope not to cry too much," Hanu said in a news release.
Hanu said the inspiration for such an ambitious project came from his experiences at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2014. He was working as a research scientist and attended a conference on NASA's new Space Launch System — which will be its most powerful rocket to be built, according to the agency.
"I was blown away. I couldn't believe that American students and researchers had these opportunities that we didn't have in Canada," he said. "I said, 'I want to do this with a university in Canada.'"
Hanu said that when he returned to McMaster, he spent a month designing a rough concept and brought forward the proposal — labelled "Do you want to build a satellite?" — on Jan. 31, 2015.
It's one of 15 projects chosen to be funded through the Canadian CubeSat Project in 2017, where they began to receive financial support from the Canadian Space Agency and Ontario power provider Bruce Power.
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