Grants and Contributions

The primary goal of the CubeSats Initiative in Canada for STEM (CUBICS) project will be to develop high-level skills in aspiring professionals in the space sector. It will concentrate on improving their individual competence as well as their ability to collaborate effectively in multidisciplinary projects. Concurrently, the project will have objectives in science and technology, collaborative work and STEM promotion, such as: •Continue to provide space oriented high-level skills trainings and form future space industry professionals •Continue to contribute to space-related sciences and technological developments. •Continue to contribute into climate change studies.
Space Concordia aims to have an impact on the development of space technologies by improving the overall performance and robustness of space integrated artificial intelligence models on CubeSats, which would create a space perturbation model to help test and validate the robustness in questions.

This research aims to develop the Pitch REsolving Spectroscopy for Electron Transport (PRESET) CubeSat (small satellite). The PRESET project will develop cutting-edge technologies for space radiation detection, magnetometry, digital signal processing, satellite communications, and attitude determination and control which will have a significant impact on Canada’s space industry and economic growth. Data collected from PRESET CubeSat will help us better understand how electrons move in low-Earth orbit during geomagnetic storms and their impact on the upper atmosphere. The advanced radiation detection technology developed by PRESET can also be used by Canadian nuclear industries to accurately measure real-time radiation doses, particularly during maintenance periods of the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear power plants. This has been a challenging task due to the mixed radiation fields encountered in such situations. Additionally, the PRESET project will also contribute to training highly qualified Canadian personnel in space science, space engineering and radiation detection technology.

Optimizing insect farming with an eye toward circular food production can both improve global food security and lead to new innovations for space travel. A primary goal of the project is to increase insect farm yield and to determine how to best manipulate diet content (Entomo-Alliance Project Objective 1) and environmental context (Entomo-Alliance Project Objective 2) to improve rearing facilities and practices and testing these findings at the cricket farm (Entomo-Alliance Project Objective 3). With support from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), additional personnel will be added to these ongoing projects to build a sustainable circular food system (CSA funded project Objective 1). Circular food systems and colony monitoring will be essential components of future deep space travel, and this project will help place Canadian industry and academics at the global forefront of discovery in deep space food production.

This project is an extension of the Silva21 Alliance project, which aims to provide tools and practical solutions to adapt forest management practices and improve both resistance to stressors and resilience to disturbance in Canadian forests. The project framework involves a series of three themes i.e. 'Observe', 'Anticipate', 'Adapt'. In ‘Observe’, space-based data is used to develop innovative forest monitoring approaches to assess forest disturbance, tree growth and forest vigour. This project provides a unique opportunity to combine key forestry needs for the Canadian industry with high-tech, space-based, solutions provided by the Canadian Space Agency to ensure that forestry in Canada remains a critical resource both for Gross Domestic Product as well as a natural climate solution to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Movement is fundamental to the lives of animals, and due to the seasonality at high latitudes a high proportion of Canada’s wildlife is migratory. Understanding the life cycles and threats to these animals requires detailed information about migratory routes and timing, as well as sources of mortality. The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a ground-based network of receivers for tracking radio-tagged animals. ICARUS uses sophisticated Global Positioning System (GPS) and multisensory transmitters, but currently lacks a space-based platform to receive data from the transmitters. The Western Skylark CubeSat will provide space-based data collection for both Motus and ICARUS to give near real time capabilities to the data flow from these systems. This project will demonstrate the full potential of these two systems while collecting novel data on migratory songbirds, waterbirds, and shorebirds. A 3U CubeSat with both Motus and ICARUS transponders will act as a relay collecting data from remote Motus ground stations and retransmitting that data back to the ground station at Western University.

The AlbertaSat team from University of Alberta will build off of an existing satellite bus to further improve student designed components and dedicate more resources to improving the payload interface. One of their goals is to make an open source cube satellite design further extending a cost-effective platform for functional data collection from space. The data collected from the CubeSats Initiative in Canada for STEM (CUBICS) mission will be used by research facilities across Canada to provide insight into our ice caps and oceans, a fundamental part of Canada’s landscape, and thus will increase our understanding of the causes and the effects of climate change.

With Canada's Arctic regions experiencing the effects of climate change faster than the rest of the country, northern Inuit and Indigenous communities require assistance. Traditional travel and hunting routes are being disrupted by unsafe ice conditions as multi-year ice melts, creating a need for community-driven remote sensing. To help address this need, an interdisciplinary team of Arctic climate change scientists, remote sensing specialists, and space systems engineers are proposing the ArcticSat Mission: A community co-developed 3U CubeSat equipped with a high-frequency microwave radiometer capable of detecting ice/water interfaces from a polar orbit and operated by community members from Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut and Churchill, Manitoba. Equipped with timely data on ice and snow conditions (including ponds of fresh water during the melt season), communities will be able to assess safe travel corridors and monitor how the surrounding environment is changing on a weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual basis -- and how it may change in the future. Most importantly, ArcticSat will be designed, built, and operated in cooperation with northern community members, sharing the data freely over the SIKU Indigenous Knowledge Social Network, making it one of the most accessible sources of space data for northern Canadian communities.

This project proposes the development of an end-to-end “design, build, test and launch” 3U-CubeSat for monitoring climate change, and the associated engineering challenges to design and integrate science payloads and all the other subsystems with significant design limitations in terms of weight, volume and power. Skya’anaSat will aim to collect scientific data on the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans in order to improve our understanding on the mechanisms of climate change. The payload design combines active microwave and high frequency (HF) radio sensing from orbit, via software-defined radio (SDR), to make a powerful and novel climate and Earth science monitoring satellite in a highly-compact form and quick end-to-end development.

This low-cost and high-value demonstration of Mission Control’s Spacefarer software platform and a Virtual Reality Camera System will comprise Canada’s first ever commercial rover mission. In partnership with a US-based lunar transportation company, Mission Control will deploy a rover on the south pole of the Moon in 2024. The demonstration will investigate user experience in deep space robotic operations, and specifically how intuitive user displays, semi-autonomous driving modes enabled by artificial intelligence, and immersive reality lower the cognitive load, operator fatigue, and operator training needs while increasing mission success. Dozens of students and post-docs from four Canadian universities will operate the rover alongside Mission Control staff and youth from underserved communities. Following a successful demonstration Mission Control will be poised for further growth in international markets as Spacefarer is adapted for use on new missions.

The main objective of this project is to enhance and expand the research into passive flow control elements development and deployment on glider wings for improved performance in terms of maximum altitude and stratospheric flight duration. The outcome of this work will enhance the performance and peak altitude of the new commercial glider platform at stratospheric elevations. This new technology offers an environmentally friendly, versatile, and cost-effective option for high-altitude Earth observation, satellite testing, and monitoring missions using autonomous aerial vehicles.