Grants and Contributions

Applicants with a design for a remote healthcare technology concept were invited to apply to the Challenge. After competing in Stage 2 of the Challenge as a semi-finalist, the recipient was selected as a finalist for a $350,000 cash prize.

Applicants with a design for a remote healthcare technology concept were invited to apply to the Challenge. After competing in Stage 2 of the Challenge as a semi-finalist, the recipient was selected as a finalist for a $350,000 cash prize.

Applicants with a design for a remote healthcare technology concept were invited to apply to the Challenge. After competing in Stage 2 of the Challenge as a semi-finalist, the recipient was selected as a finalist for a $350,000 cash prize.

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.

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.

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.

A major goal of the project is to bring together the University of Saskatchewan and University of Regina under the common effort of demonstrating and evaluating the effectiveness of new radiation mitigating technologies for computer hardware in space, engaging students in unique hands-on learning, and educating the public about Canada's and Saskatchewan's contributions to STEM.

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.

The CSA is providing funding via a Grant Agreement to the university to allow one of its scientists to participate in NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group.