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Archive for the True North Strong category

 

Credits: Pat Rawlings

 

 

Excavation is a necessary first step towards extracting resources from the lunar regolith and building human settlements on the moon. NASA’s Lunabotics Mining Competition is designed to promote the development of interest in lunar regolith mining, which is especially challenging due to the unique properties of the lunar regolith, reduced gravity, and vacuum.

 

 

A Canadian team took first place in the second edition of NASA’s Lunabotics Mining Competition. Team Production of Laurentian University of Sudbury, Ontario, consisted of 4th year mechanical engineering students. The team had to compete with teams from 40 other universities from the U.S., Canada, India, Chile, and Bangladesh.

 

The competition was conducted at Kennedy Space Center, from May 23 to May 28, 2011. The minimum excavation requirement was 10 kilograms and the maximum excavation hardware mass was 80 kilograms. The lunabots performed in an enclosure (a.k.a. Lunarena) filled with compacted lunar regolith simulant.

 

The Canadian lunabot was able to excavate 237.4 kilograms of synthetic lunar regolith in 15 minutes. The team won a $5,000 cash prize and VIP passes to the final launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in July.

 

 

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Credits: CSA

 

Canada is actively involved in space debris mitigation research and development activities. At the international level, Canada hosted the International Conference on Protection of Materials and Structures from the Space Environment (ICPMSE) in May 2008, and contributed to the 37th Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly in July 2008.

 

 

At the national level, the space debris research and development activities are coordinated by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which formed the Orbital Debris Working Group (ODWG). The group was formed in order to address a number of objectives:

“to increase the Scientific and Technical (S&T) knowledge and awareness of orbital debris in the space community;

to identify and encourage targeted Research and Development (R&D) in orbital debris and mitigation measures;

to identify and encourage development of orbital debris detection and collision avoidance techniques and technologies;

to promote Scientific and Technical (S&T) collaboration across Canada and with our international partners;

to identify Scientific and Technical (S&T) opportunities in relation to future potential missions which can directly benefit from the results of targeted Research and Development (R&D) and novel operational techniques, and develop and coordinate technical solution in Canada and with international partners; and

to establish and maintain technical liaison with our international partners in order to foster a sustainable space environment.”

 

The Canadian space debris mitigation research and development activities are focused on three main areas: hypervelocity impact facilities, debris mitigation and self healing materials, and spacecraft demise technologies. Hypervelocity impact facilities are facilities that are capable of accelerating projectiles to velocities of more than 10 km/s. Canada is developing an implosion-driven hypervelocity launcher facility. Such a facility could accelerate projectiles having a mass of 10 g to speeds of 10 km/s, facilitating meaningful impact studies. Self healing materials have the capability to initiate a self healing process after an impact, being an in-situ mitigation of space debris damage on board spacecraft. The Canadian Space Agency has supported the efforts to develop and test a self healing concept demonstrator. The spacecraft demise technologies ensure intentional and integral disintegration during re-entry, so that no debris reaches Earth. In this direction, studies that investigate various technologies that could be used to de-orbit micro- and nanosatellites have been conducted.

 

In Canada, the space operators and manufacturers are adopting the space debris mitigation measures on a voluntary basis. The Inter-Agency Space Debris (IADC) guidelines are used for monitoring activities to prevent on-orbit collisions and conduct post-mission disposal. There are also strict requirements integrated in its policies and regulations that address the post-mission disposal of satellites. For example, as required by the Canadian Remote Sensing Space System Act, space system manufacturers have to provide information regarding the method of disposal for the satellite, the estimated duration of the satellite disposal operation, the probability of loss of human life, the amount of debris expected to reach the surface of the Earth upon re-entry, an estimate of the orbital debris expected to be released by the satellite during normal operations by explosion, etc. There are also interesting recommendations made for the operation and post-mission disposal of satellites in Geostationary Orbits. The Environmental Protection of the Geostationary Satellite Orbit recommends “that as little debris as possible should be released into the geostationary orbit during the placement of a satellite in orbit”, and also that “a geostationary satellite at the end of its life should be transferred, before complete exhaustion of its propellant, to a super synchronous graveyard orbit”, where the recommended minimum re-orbiting altitude is given as 300 km.

 

 

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January 29, 2011

MSCI Announces Satellite Constellation

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Credits: MSCI

 

The COMMStellation satellites will orbit the Earth on polar orbits 1,000 km above the surface of the Earth. The satellites will be deployed in six orbital planes, thirteen operational satellites per plane, plus one for redundancy. The deployment will be cost efficient, only six launches being required to deploy the whole constellation.

 

As oppose to Iridium, which is accessible from portable devices, the COMMStellation will be connected to terrestrial telecommunication networks through twenty ground stations located around the Earth. The required ground stations are less expensive than those used for communication with satellites on medium Earth orbits and geostationary orbits.

 

MSCI claims it has perfected the construction of microsatellites and the use of commercial-grade components for development of microsatellites. These factors have led to low manufacturing costs and improved schedules.

 

An alternative to COMMStellation is proposed by O3b Networks, located in St. John, Jersey, Channel Islands. The O3b Networks constellation satellites will provide broadband connectivity within forty-five degrees latitude north and south of the equator. The constellation will consist of eight satellites at 8,000 km above the surface of the Earth. There are a number of advantages in using the low Earth orbit polar microsatellites, as MSCI is proposing, over using equatorial medium Earth orbit satellites: the polar orbits provide full coverage of the terrestrial surface and microsatellite technology has less cost and increased reliability associated with it.

 

It is also worth mentioning a previous attempt at creating a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide access to the Internet – Teledesic.

 

You can read more about COMMStellation on MSCI’s website.

 

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November 27, 2010

AISsat-1 Mission Needs Votes

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Credits: FFI

 

AIS, which stands for Automatic Identification System, provides navigation aid and works as an anti-collision system for vessels at sea. As of December 31, 2004, as required by IMO (the International Maritime Organization), an AIS device must be fitted aboard all passenger ships, all ships engaged on international voyages that have more than 300 gross tonnage, and cargo ships not engaged on international voyages that have more than 500 gross tonnage.

 

 

AIS devices aboard the ships broadcast messages containing position reports and short messages with information about the ship and the voyage. These messages are sent on two channels in the maritime VHF to neighboring vessels and to VTS (Vessel Traffic Services) stations on the shore. These messages can also be picked up by a VHF receiver in low Earth orbit (LEO). This is how the idea of space monitoring of AIS signals was born.

 

Norway, a nation having long shore lines and large fishing grounds in its coastal waters, pioneered this new concept. AISsat-1 is a nanosatellite technology demonstration mission in LEO, funded by the NSC (the Norwegian Space Center). The technical implementation is the responsibility of the FFI (Norwegian Defense Research Establishment).

 

AISsat-1 is a cube-shaped nanosatellite measuring 20 x 20 x 20 cm that weighs six kilograms. AISsat-1 has been built at UTIAS (the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies). The payload on AISsat-1, the AIS sensor, was developed by Kongsberg Seatex AS (KSX) of Trondheim, Norway.

 

The satellite design is based on the Generic Nanosatellite Bus (GNB) developed at UTIAS. GNB contains all the necessary components for a typical satellite mission: a TT&C and payload data communication system, a 3-axis attitude determination and control system, and a dual-battery, gallium-arsenide triple-junction solar cell based power system. GNB has a large accommodation for scientific payloads in terms of volume, power, computing power, and spacecraft surface area.

 

AISsat-1 shared a ride to space on a multi-payload mission on the PSLV-C15 launch vehicle on July 12, 2010. PSLV lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, India. The satellite has been placed into a polar orbit at 98.1 degrees inclination with perigee at 626 km and apogee at 642 km. The orbit has a period of 97.3 minutes.

 

The ground station that acquires data from AISsat-1 during the 15 daily passes over Norwegian waters is the Svalbard Ground Station, located on the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, near the town of Longyearbyen. The ground station is storing data for subsequent forwarding to the mission control center located at FFI in southern Norway.

 

AISsat-1 has entered the Norwegian Top Technological Achievement Competition for 2010. You are invited to cast your vote for AISsat-1, a mission based on Canadian nanosatellite technology. You can submit your vote by the end of this Sunday, November 28, 2010, on this webpage. If you have difficulties understanding Norwegian, this Google Translate link will do the trick for you. Go Canada!

 

You can find more information about AISsat-1 on the Norwegian Space Centre’s website.

 

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Credits: NASA/CSA

 

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield will take command of the station during the second half of his third space mission. Hadfield will launch aboard a Soyuz rocket in December 2012, and spend six months on the station as part of the crew of Expedition 34/35. He will return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule in June 2013.

 

Hadfield is the only Canadian to board the Russian Mir space station, in 1995, during his first space flight, while he served as Mission Specialist 1 on STS-74. He is also the first Canadian mission specialist and the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit.

 

 

His second space flight was onboard STS-100, where he served as Mission Specialist 1. STS-100 was the International Space Station assembly flight 6A, which delivered and installed the Canadarm-2 on the station. During this mission, Hadfield performed two spacewalks.

 

Chris Hadfield also served as Director of Operations for NASA at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia; as Chief of Robotics for the NASA Astronaut Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; as Chief of International Space Station Operations; and as the Commander of NEEMO 14, a NASA undersea mission to test exploration concepts living in an underwater facility off the Florida coast.

 

The official announcement was made by the Canadian Space Agency. Chris Hadfield’s biography is also available here.

 

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Credits: CSA

 

RADARSAT-1 is the first commercial Earth observation satellite developed in Canada, and it is equipped with a powerful synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument.

 

Launched on November 4, 1995, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the satellite is well beyond the planned five-year lifetime, and continues to provide images of the Earth for both scientific and commercial applications.

 

 

Canada is involved in space debris mitigation research and development activities. In Canada, these activities are coordinated by the Canadian Space Agency, which formed a group, the Orbital Debris Working Group, in order to address a number of objectives such as to increase the knowledge and awareness of orbital debris in the space community, to encourage research in orbital debris and mitigation measures, and to support development of orbital debris detection and collision avoidance techniques and technologies.

 

In Canada, the space operators and manufacturers are adopting space debris mitigation measures on a voluntary basis. Existing guidelines are used for monitoring activities to prevent on-orbit collisions and conduct post-mission disposal procedures. Space system manufacturers have to provide, among other things, information regarding the method of disposal for the satellite and the estimated duration of the satellite disposal operation.

 

Credits: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio

 

The Canadian Space Agency has prepared post-mission disposal plans for its remote sensing satellite RADARSAT-1, plans that comply with the guidelines of the United Nations document entitled Guidelines for Space Debris Mitigation and with the measures required for the space hardware manufacturers in Canada.

 

The remaining fuel will be used to lower the orbit and orient the satellite so that drag is maximized.

 

 

Also, the energy stored in the propellant tanks, the reaction wheels, and the batteries of the satellite will be removed. In this way, the on-orbit retirement period of the satellite is reduced to the lowest possible.

 

You can find more information about RADARSAT-1 on the Canadian Space Agency’s web site.

 

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