Grants and Contributions

Community Facility: The project aims to expand and improve the courtyard and build a volleyball court in the municipality of St-Gilles to help this community recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attraction Upgrades: The project aims to develop the tourism offer provided by a local business, by adjusting its product to the current context and by adopting environmentally responsible practices.

Acquisition of digital equipment: The project aims to improve productivity and increase the production capacity of a company.

Community Facility: The project aims to expand and improve the courtyard and build a volleyball court in the municipality of St-Gilles to help this community recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital equipment acquisition: The project aims to increase the production capacity and optimize the operations of a company that specializes in the manufacture of high-end bicycles.

Spacecraft in the weightless environment rely on fuel tanks to contain the fluid mixtures for propulsion. In weightlessness, this fluid reorients to minimize its thermodynamic energy and can take on unknowns shapes inside the fuel tank. Thus, guiding the fuel in the desired fashion to a spacecraft’s thrusters remains a challenging task. To circumvent the uncertainty of fuel supply to the thrusters, fuel tanks are purposely made larger to hold extra fuel, in addition to other necessary arrangements to force fuel to the thrusters. The larger fuel tanks and additional parts to supply on-demand seamless fuel result in additional mass, volume, and weight to space propulsion systems and to overall mission costs.

The proposed payload development focuses on prototyping, testing, and demonstrating an innovative space technology to mitigate the disadvantages of current spacecraft fuel tanks, by engineering new fuel tanks that self-guide the fuel to occupy desired locations within the tank. The hypothesized passive liquid transport technique will therefore enable fuel tanks for spacecraft to be smaller, lighter and less bulky, which will reduce the costs associated with design, launch and operation.

Astrobiology and the search for life in our solar system is a major focus of planetary exploration. In the coming decades, astrobiology investigations will be primarily focused on Mars, Europa and Enceladus which are characterized by extremely cold temperatures. In this context, the Devon Island Subglacial Lake complex, discovered in 2018 and lying ~600 m under the Devon Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic, represents the first hypersaline subglacial lake complex discovered on Earth with estimated temperatures of ~-12°C and a salinity of ~14% (4.5 times greater than the oceans). These conditions make this subglacial waterbody one of Earth’s most extreme environments and it is the closest known analogue to the extraterrestrial habitats hypothesized to exist on Mars (subsurface lakes, residual slope linea), Europa (subsurface ocean), and Enceladus.

This project will be the first phase of a program that is ultimately planned to access and sample the Devon Island Subglacial lakes, which will provide crucial data sets and experience. It will also provide excellent training and mentoring to Canadian highly qualified personnel through synergistic interactions within a multidisciplinary team with integrated project components including site characterization; instrument development, the advancement and testing of new technologies in this cryoenvironment, and the potential discovery of novel microbial ecosystems. The ice drill and life detection instrumentation could be robotized and integrated into future planetary exploration missions attached to surface rover platforms.

Additionally, due to their robust and portable nature, these systems have applications in industry for field detection and identification of microorganisms in remote extreme environments, as well as health care settings. This is applicable for rapid clinical diagnoses, biomonitoring, food safety, and environmental analyses, including, for example, in monitoring, detecting, and identifying
pathogens during epidemics in remote locations.

To clearly map small and distant objects in space, such as black holes in nearby galaxies, astronomers point radio telescopes from all over the world at the same location in the sky. Later, they combine the recorded light waveforms using software on powerful computers, generating an interference pattern that can be used to map out the distant object, as though it was observed with a telescope the size of the Earth.

The goal of the Balloon-borne Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment (BVEX) is to demonstrate that a telescope suspended from a high-altitude stratospheric balloon can be used as an interferometry station. Stratospheric balloons operate above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere, so they should be ideal for observing the high frequency light needed to resolve more distant black hole shadows. To achieve this goal, BVEX will use a GPS system and accelerometers to track the 3-D position of a small radio telescope to an unprecedented resolution.

This project will demonstrate stratospheric balloon interferometry at cm wavelengths, and provide practice to students in the field of space-like missions and interferometry, offering training for a new generation of highly qualified scientists, engineers, high-tech and aerospace professionals. The results obtained in this experiment will be used to launch similar, follow-on projects in the future.

Musculoskeletal health decline is common in older adults and in astronauts returning from extended space missions. The main purpose of this project is to assess whether wireless blood flow restriction (BFR) technology implemented through telehealth can become a first-choice exercise delivery and monitoring tool in remote environments, like rural areas and outer space. Its primary objective is to determine and optimize the effectiveness of BFR technology to preserve health among physically inactive older adults and long-term hospitalized adults confined to bed rest and determine if it is feasible to use this technology remotely. BFR training combines low intensity exercise with blood flow occlusion and has been shown to be safe and effective in improving musculoskeletal health. Recently, BFR technology became wireless and affordable. As well, wireless BFR training can be performed in small areas like hospital beds and space exploration capsules and enable use of small equipment and low training intensities. Individuals cannot always benefit from in-person training due to being situated in hard to access environments like rural areas and outer space. Remote exercise and telerehabilitation platforms have shown that telehealth can be an effective way to deliver training.

Thus, this project will optimize the use of wireless BFR technology with telehealth in delivering remote BFR training improving musculoskeletal health for astronauts and Canadians at large. It will also provide an opportunity for the next generation of Canadian researchers to acquire an expertise in BFR training and impact the future development of space mission design and musculoskeletal injury rehabilitation. Canadians will benefit from a technology and training technique allowing them to potentially recover faster and more effectively from musculoskeletal injuries.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are driving the adoption of robotics and automation in space and on Earth, providing new solutions for exploration and surveying, passenger transport, last-mile delivery, and automated warehouses. Nonetheless, humans will remain indispensable to supervise and manage such fleets, as humans and computers have complementary strengths. However, human operators’ capacities will be challenged and exceeded as task complexity and fleet size increase. The deployment of fleets of autonomous vehicles opens up transformational opportunities in space applications and on Earth. However, large-scale deployment is held back by safety and reliability of these systems, and a lack of personnel trained in this interdisciplinary research area.

The project’s main objectives are to establish generalizability of a machine learning (ML) algorithm between simple and complex cognitive tasks in a laboratory environment; to establish generalizability of this algorithm between lab-based and simulated space exploration environments, in a virtual reality (VR) environment; to test the effectiveness of basic adaptive automation of workload level within the simulated mission environment in real-time; and to perform a proof-of-concept transfer to real-world robotic control, in an analogue exploration mission. This work will satisfy a pressing need for validating physiological markers of cognitive workload, and contribute highly qualified personnel to the Canadian workforce.

Although this research specifically aims at facilitating space missions, outcomes could be applicable to any situation where humans are required to perform critical tasks using semi-autonomous tools. It holds natural applications on Earth for mining, drone delivery, and monitoring of fleets of self-driving cars.