NASA just launched a satellite made by 150 Ontario students

After eight years of research and development, a new satellite created by a team of more than 150 students and researchers from Hamilton’s McMaster University will be deployed into orbit Tuesday night.

The device, called The NEUDOSE (NEUtron DOSimetry and Exploration), measures the amount of radiation outside the earth’s atmosphere in an effort to better understand the detrimental effects of prolonged exposure on astronauts.

“On a mission to Mars, an astronaut may receive the equivalent radiation dose that we would receive in our whole life on Earth,” Andrei Hanu, the project’s creator and co-principal investigator, said in a release.

“This has the potential to increase the risk of cancer or cataract formation, in addition to the other physiological challenges that astronauts would have to battle on their journey.”

Hanu, who is an adjunct professor in McMaster’s department of Physics and Astronomy and a senior scientist at Bruce Power, came up with the idea while working as a post-doctoral researcher at NASA in 2014. Work on NEUDOSE began in January 2015 with a poster campaign on McMaster’s campus and a meeting of student volunteers.

The device, which is just 20 centimetres tall, is now ready to be deployed into the earth's orbit.

It is currently at NASA’s Kennedy Space Station at Cape Canaveral and will soon be loaded onto the SpaceX CRS-27 resupply mission to the International Space Station this evening before being launched into space.

The project was completed through the Canadian CubeSat Project, which provides professors in post-secondary institutions with an opportunity to engage their students in a real space mission, and funded by the Canadian Space Agency and Bruce Power.

The NEUDOSE, which is McMaster’s first satellite, is expected to orbit the earth for one to two years. During that time, data collected will be transmitted to a ground station at McMaster.

“I’m very excited to get these measurements,” said McMaster grad Eric Johnston, chief innovation officer at the Nuclear Innovation Institute and NEUDOSE’s co-principal investigator.

“If we really want to understand what the long-term effects of human space travel are, especially if we go to Mars and beyond, we’re going to need to start studying the quality of the radiation.”

More than 20 members of the team behind NEUDOSE are in Florida to attend the launch.

“If you’d told me five years ago that at some point we would get here, it would have been incredibly difficult to believe you. This launch represents the culmination of eight years of hard work and dedication from the entire team,” Hanu said.

“I hope not to cry too much.”

The project was completed through the Canadian CubeSat Project, which provides professors in post-secondary institutions with an opportunity to engage their students in a real space mission, and funded by the Canadian Space Agency and Bruce Power.