OTTAWA – When Nathalie Nguyen-Quoc Ouellette was young, she didn’t see many stars in Montreal’s bright skies.
OTTAWA – When Nathalie Nguyen-Quoc Ouellette was young, she didn’t see many stars in Montreal’s bright skies. But she would examine the colorful, otherworldly images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and dream of becoming an astrophysicist.
“I really fell in love with space and astronomy,” he said. “Much remains to be discovered.”
Today, the deputy director of the Université de Montréal’s Trottier Institute for Exoplanet Research presents herself as an outreach scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, a role that sees her connecting her science team with the general public and the children he hopes to inspire.
It’s a “truly fantastic” time for space exploration, Ouellette said.
From the stunning first images produced by the powerful new telescope to the early success of the Artemis mission to the moon, the world’s fascination with space is going into hyperdrive.
And Canada is playing no small part in some of the major projects that had aspiring scientists starry-eyed again in 2022, with major milestones yet to come.
But while Canadian space experts wax poetic about the current picture, they are waiting to see if the influx of federal investment will continue despite domestic economic pressures.
For the team behind the James Webb Telescope, named after the NASA administrator who led the Apollo program, it’s been a “very, very busy year,” Ouellette said.
The telescope, which sent its first dazzling images back to Earth in July, includes two Canadian components, and Canadian researchers are among those busy analyzing its findings.
“Within hours of data collection, it was already blowing previous missions out of the water,” Ouellette said.
He noted that a team from the University of Toronto discovered some of the oldest globular clusters, or groups of millions of stars held together by gravity. And sometime in the early months of 2023, researchers at the University of Montreal are expected to make the first analysis of the TRAPPIST-1 system, home to seven Earth-like planets.
NASA’s Artemis mission, which plans the first human exploration of the Moon since the 1960s, also saw major milestones this year.
The Artemis I flight, which saw the Orion spacecraft fall into temporary lunar orbit, returned to Earth on Sunday after a successful launch on November 16.
Next year, the Canadian Space Agency will announce which Canadian astronaut is joining the crew of Artemis II, which is expected to launch in 2024.
The move will make Canada the second country in the world for a human being to go into deep space, or the region of space beyond the dark side of our Moon, said Gordon Osinski, a professor at Western University in London, Ont.
“I still don’t know how Canada pulled it off,” he said, calling it an “incredible coup” to have a Canadian astronaut on board.
“Some of the pictures of Artemis just blew my mind,” he said. “As someone who wasn’t alive during Apollo, seeing these images in real time is amazing. And so I think it’s going to be very inspiring, this mission.”
Canadarm3, the successor to two previous robotic arms designed in Canada, is expected to be launched in 2027, and its design by Canadian company MDA is already underway. It is expected to dock at the lunar gateway of the Artemis mission, an outpost that will orbit the Moon.
Meanwhile, Osinski has been named principal investigator for Canada’s first rover mission, which is expected to land on the moon’s south pole as early as 2026. Design of the rover by Canadansys Aerospace Corporation will begin in earnest next year. , he said.
“People have been talking about this for a long time,” Osinski said. “For the past 10 or 15 years, we’ve been doing study after study. We’ve been paid to think about doing it and develop concepts for it. But we’re actually doing it, which is really amazing.”
Canadian Space Agency President Lisa Campbell said this has been “a really exciting time” for the national space program.
“It’s like a dream factory and an innovation machine,” he said.
Campbell cited a myriad of ways Canada is involved in international public- and private-sector projects focused on exploring the Moon and beyond. But he also stressed that Canadian efforts in space are not just about exploring its outer limits, but also have applications at home.
The agency, Natural Resources Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada were promised $169 million in this year’s federal budget to deliver and operate a new wildfire monitoring satellite, which is expected to which will be launched in 2028.
Canada is also part of an atmospheric observation project with NASA that will collect data to anticipate extreme weather events on Earth.
And in 2022, the agency launched a Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, a competition to develop diagnostic and detection technologies that can be used both on manned deep space missions and in remote communities across Canada.
“The challenges of space push us to innovate the things we need here on Earth,” Campbell said.
Many moon-related projects, including the rover mission, have received funding from the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program, a five-year, $150 million fund that scientists like Osinski hope will be renewed.
“I would like for us to have all these missions to the moon in the next two, three years and that’s it, and then we’ll be back to square one,” Osinski said. “The CSA needs to convince the government that this is a worthwhile endeavour.”
While Campbell said the program has been “very popular,” he would not say whether the federal government has committed to funding another term.
“Additional investments are always welcome,” he said.
The federal Liberals’ space strategy, released in 2019, committed Canada to remaining a space nation and recognized “the importance of space as a strategic national asset.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on December 11, 2022.
Marie-Danielle Smith, The Canadian Press