Students Aim to Send Satellite into Space

A team of undergraduate students is working to have a UVic-built satellite sent into orbit.

The university’s ECOSat team was one of three finalists in the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge, which wrapped up Sept. 29 in Ottawa with the announcement of a second offering of the competition with similar parameters. The inaugural Canada-wide competition required university teams to design and build a small, low-cost satellite to full space-qualification standards, with the winning entry (Concordia) intended to be launched to conduct scientific research.

The UVic team overcame a number of challenges in getting a working satellite to Ottawa, including learning about and starting the two-year competition months after it was announced. The satellite is the size of a milk carton and carried a full payload of instrumentation for a number of experiments involving magnetic fields.

“It was an all-out blitz right to the end just to keep things working,” says Justin Curran, a fourth-year electrical engineering student and the team’s chief engineer.

The only exclusively undergraduate team among the final three, the ECOSat team also had the lowest budget ($25,000). With the lessons learned from the first offering of the competition, which initially involved teams from 12 universities, as well as the recent launch of UVic’s Centre for Aerospace Research, the team is already working to put the pieces in place for a strong entry in the next round—and hopefully send an example of UVic engineering excellence into orbit in the spring of 2014.

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High-resolution photos are available upon request.