Calgary, we have a problem, or do we? Come fall 2025, Calgary’s first student-built and designed satellite will be heading to space, but the out-of-this-world design was not as easy as it seems.

The satellite, FrontierSat, is a CubeSat that is 34 cm long, or about the size of a loaf of bread. 

CalgaryToSpace (CTS), the satellite’s designers, are a more than 100-person team of University of Calgary students. The team was founded in 2020.

In the five years since, CTS has had two presidents. The second, and current, Kaleigh Beer, became president when the club’s original president graduated.

“I’ve been at CalgaryToSpace for almost four years. I joined when the project was maybe about a year old,” she said.

“Once the first president of the team, who also founded the team, graduated, he was looking for a replacement. By that point, I was just so involved in the project that it was a natural fit.”

Beer has been president of the team for close to two years and is the main point of contact between CTS and the company that will eventually launch the satellite to space, SpaceX.

FrontierSat’s frame, mechanisms for the payloads and onboard computer, including software, were both built in-house.

The CubeSat is set to house two experiments. The first is from a UCalgary PhD candidate, Beer described the payload as a boom arm made of woven carbon materials.

“When it deploys, it can be very stiff, but very, very lightweight, and so it took a fair amount of engineering to get the burn wire deployment mechanism working properly and making sure that it was going to come out and not cause a problem,” Beer said.

The second experiment comes from a University of Calgary faculty member, Johnathan Burchill. 

Burchill said that his device studies the ionosphere, which is the ionized part of the upper atmosphere that the Aurora Borealis is part of. He described the device as a high-tech wind sock.

“It’s designed after something that’s been flying since 2013 and making measurements of the upper atmosphere and winds and things like that. But that’s a fairly big instrument, and my aim was to miniaturize it to make it fit on the so-called cubesats,” he said.

“We call our version the miniature plasma imager or MPI.”

Despite being developed in the mid-2010s, the MPI sat waiting for the right mission. Burchill said that FrontierSat became the perfect fit during an early-stage design review.

“I was invited to a design review for an early version of the satellite, it’s a couple of hours of advisors asking questions and checking if the design looks like it’s going to work,” Burchill said.

“There was an empty space in the front of the design, the students were really focusing on the technology muscle and the payload, and I thought, ‘there’s enough space in there for this mini plasma imager.’ So I mentioned it to them, expressed interest in having it fly on their mission and generally, they loved the idea.”

CubeSats have no guarantees

Before any experiments can start and the cubesat can be sent to space, it must pass a vibration test, the next major milestone for the project.

“Basically, your satellite is not allowed to fly if you don’t pass a vibration test,” Beer said.

“Other people’s satellites are also going up on the rocket and if yours is not together properly and something happens, you can seriously damage somebody else’s stuff, or even could damage the rocket itself.”

Once the CubeSat is in space, it will begin relaying messages back to the team. However, they may never hear from it.

“Forty per cent of CubeSats don’t make it. People never hear from them. This is obviously our first attempt and it’s a lot more expensive than what many people’s first attempts are,” Beer said.

“It’s supporting real research and there’s been government funding that’s gone into it and all that. I think that it would just be the best feeling ever to know that we actually accomplished the goal.”