As the International Space Station traveled across the Pacific Ocean early Sunday morning (November 27), a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft carrying a miniature satellite built by University of Victoria students went dock autonomously to the station’s space-facing Harmony module port.
UVic’s optical reference calibration satellite, known as ORCASat, began its journey into space at 11:20 a.m. Saturday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Witnessing the launch was a huge relief for ORCASat project manager Alex Doknjas, who watched nervously from his family’s living room in Greater Victoria on Saturday morning. “It was pretty amazing,” Doknjas, a recent graduate of UVic’s engineering program, told Black Press Media. The initial release scheduled for Tuesday, November 22 was scrapped due to bad weather.
UVic’s ORCASat won a national competition funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Canadian CubeSat Project, in which 15 student teams from each province and territory designed and built their own CubeSat using the guide of CSA experts and representatives of the Canadian space. industry As a result, UVic’s satellite was one of two Canadian post-secondary projects chosen to be part of Saturday’s launch, along with a satellite built by students at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS.
“It’s pretty remarkable, especially since UVic is not a big school,” Doknjas said. “I think it’s pretty impressive.”
More than 100 full-time researchers, co-op students and volunteers from UVic Satellite Design, UBC Orbit and Simon Fraser University Satellite Design have contributed to the project which began in 2018.
Tristan Tarnowski, ORCASat team member and UVic engineering student, during the assembly of the UVic satellite. (Courtesy ORCASat)
ORCASat is comparable in size to a two liter carton of milk or a box of tissues, and weighs only about two and a half kilograms. Once sent into Earth orbit, the satellite will act as an artificial star, serving as an orbiting reference light source that can be seen with telescopes on Earth, Doknjas said.
“What we’re trying to do is demonstrate this concept of calibrating telescopes,” he said. “If you are a telescope on the ground observing a star, you are observing the light emitted by the star and that light travels through the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is constantly changing and as light passes through it, the light is scattered, and this effect of how light reacts in the atmosphere is not well understood.”
The difference between ORCASat and a real star, however, is that scientists on Earth can communicate with ORCASat, allowing them to know exactly how bright the satellite is, in addition to how bright it appears through a telescope
“Now you have two separate measurements. You know exactly how bright it really is, and you know that it seemed bright to you. From those two measurements you can calculate the difference, which is how much of that light is lost to the ‘atmosphere,” Doknjas explained.
Doknjas said that while the concept is not new, it is the first time a light source capable of performing such an experiment has been carried on a satellite in space. He added that the technology could be used in the future for Earth observation, or even methane detection for climate change.
ORCASat will remain on the International Space Station before being launched into Earth orbit to collect data for about a year, but that depends on factors such as solar flares and solar radiation that affect the life of the satellite.
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Aviation and Space ScienceUVic