McMaster University’s first satellite, NEUDOSE, will be launched into Earth’s lower orbit as part of a SpaceX shuttle launch in Florida next week.
The project, which took eight years to develop and involved more than 150 students, staff and alumni, is designed to study the effects of space radiation on the human body.
The mini-satellite is only 20 centimetres high and will collect data outside the Earth’s atmosphere to detect and measure the amount of space radiation. Scientists hope to understand the risks astronauts face with prolonged exposure in space.
The NEUDOSE satellite is currently at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, waiting to be loaded onto the SpaceX shuttle. A command centre has been set up on the McMaster campus to receive data from NEUDOSE.
Andrei Hanu, a professor of physics and astronomy and co-principal investigator of the project, said he hoped to join more than 20 members of the project for the launch in Florida on Tuesday.
The inspiration for the project came from Hanu’s experiences at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2014, where he was working as a research scientist and attended a conference on NASA’s new Space Launch System.
Hanu spent a month designing a rough concept when he returned to McMaster and brought forward the proposal on Jan. 31, 2015, labelled “Do you want to build a satellite?”. The NEUDOSE satellite is one of 15 projects chosen to be funded through the Canadian CubeSat Project in 2017.
Daniel Tajik, who has a doctorate in electromagnetics and radio-frequency engineering from McMaster and worked primarily on the ground station system housed on campus, said he was proud how an extracurricular project “written on the backs of napkins” was now going into space.
The names of each student, staff and alumni who took part in the project was laser-etched into the side of the NEUDOSE satellite. Aaron Pitcher, a fourth-year McMaster PhD student in electrical and computer engineering, joined the project in 2016. He is now the senior systems lead and called it a valuable experience.
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