Since its creation in 2020, the UCalgary student-led club CalgaryToSpace (CTS) has been working on a bread-sized satellite they’ve named FrontierSat.
Now, six years later, their brainchild is officially among the stars.
“We held a small launch viewing party at the university, and I, along with a lot of my teammates, were there. The launch of the rocket was at about 1 a.m. Calgary time on May 3 and the deployment of our satellite was around 2:16 a.m. Calgary time,” Aarti Chandiramani, President of CTS, said.
“It was a really great experience, and the atmosphere in the room was amazing.”
Though the early morning countdown to liftoff was nothing but joyous, the design and construction process was not so easy.
Since last summer, the CTS team has been assembling, integrating, and testing the CubeSat.
“There were a lot of long hours in the lab, essentially troubleshooting multiple hours on end. You really don’t get to find issues until you start integrating everything together,” Chandiramani said.
“After the whole satellite was assembled, we had our launch being delayed, and you just had to roll with it. But we’re a team that’s really versatile and open to rolling with whatever comes our way.”
Throughout their process, CTS has worked closely with University of Calgary faculty member, Johnathan Burchill. During an early-stage design review for FrontierSat, Burchill saw a chance to integrate a device he’d been saving for the right mission.
“I looked at the design, and there was an empty spot up front where you could put one of these sensors that I’d been trying to get into space. This will be the inaugural flight of the Mini Plasma Imager (MPI) into orbit, and we’re going to study the Aurora Borealis,” he said.
While it’s in space, the MPI will be gathering data on a rare atmospheric phenomenon known as Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, or STEVE, a narrow, purple and green ribbon of light, distinct from the Aurora Borealis
“I’m interested in the physics of how all this works and so on. It’s kind of a really cool problem,” Burchill said.
“We also got funding on the basis that it guided these opportunities for students to learn how to do really cool stuff with space missions, so it’s another huge motivation to support the training. The students are learning how to solve problems as they come up and seeing that they actually can and succeed.”
Travel troubles on land
Originally, CTS planned on bringing the CubeSat as a carry-on aboard a flight to Vandenberg Space Force Base. When complications with customs halted their plan, CTS needed to pivot.
“We ended up driving the satellite to California instead of flying. What we did was we had to rent a U-Haul, because that was, surprisingly, the only last-minute one-way Canada to the US rental that we could do,” Chandiramani said.
“We drove the U-Haul from here to Montana, and then in Montana, we got our regular rental car and drove all the way to California.”
The trip took about four days to complete ahead of FrontierSat’s March 31 integration with its rocket.
As of now, CTS is working on establishing communications with the satellite.
“There’s not really many real concerns with that, because we were able to receive beacons from our satellite. These beacons contain data like the battery percentage, a message from the satellite saying hello, and other key metrics that tell us the health of the satellite and the satellite is healthy and operating quite nicely up there in space,” Chandiramani said.
Aside from FrontierSat, CTS is working on a second satellite. This time, they’re hoping to design more pieces in-house.
“We’re here to stay and leave a legacy. CalgaryToSpace really put a lot of work into establishing ourselves with FrontierSat, but there are still loads of really passionate, really great students who want to continue to make a difference in the space sector, and we’ll continue that for as long as we can,” said Chandiramani.
