The excitement has been years in the making thanks to around 140 people who have been part of a team from the University of Victoria’s Aerospace Research Centre.
A University of Victoria satellite the size of a two-litre milk carton, designed to calibrate light, was launched into space on Saturday, after four years of work by dozens of students, teachers and researchers.
ORCASat began its journey into space at 11:20 a.m. Saturday as part of the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Early Sunday morning, around 4 a.m., the satellite is scheduled to be aboard the International Space Station, where it will wait a few weeks before being launched into space to orbit the Earth during the as long as he can survive.
Saturday’s successful launch was sweet because Tuesday’s planned launch was postponed due to bad weather. UVic observers went home after the delayed launch.
A nervous Alex Doknjas, head of the ORCASat project, entered his family’s living room at 10:30 a.m. Saturday where he waited with his loved ones and about 20 others on a video chat, including a group from UVic, to watch the event together.
Cheers and applause erupted as the rocket launched on time.
“It’s great. It’s fantastic,” he said.
There was some wind at the launch site shortly before takeoff was scheduled, and Doknjas said he was worried it was about to rub off again, but that didn’t happen.
The excitement has been years in the making thanks to around 140 people who have been part of a team from the University of Victoria’s Aerospace Research Centre.
Contributed by full-time researchers, co-op students and volunteers from UVic Satellite Design, UBC Orbit and Simon Fraser University Satellite Design.
ORCASat (for Optical Reference Calibration Satellite) measures 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 23 centimeters and weighs 2.5 kilograms.
Doknjas said that as far as he knows, this is the first Cubesat designed and built in this province. “That’s a pretty big milestone.”
The estimated date to launch ORCASat is between December 29 and the first week of January.
ORCASat will orbit 400 kilometers around Earth and travel at 7.5 kilometers per second. “It’s pretty fast.”
It’s not known exactly how long it will last, but it could be six to eight months, up to 18 months, Doknjas said. Factors such as solar flares, solar radiation, pressure and more can affect the life of the satellite.
ORCASat is basically an artificial star, an orbiting reference light source that can be seen with telescopes on Earth.
Astronomers can measure the brightness of ORCASat, just as they would an astronomical object. At the same time, the satellite, using two laser light sources, will measure the amount of light emitted by an astronomical object.
This will allow ground-based telescopes to be calibrated to measure the absolute brightness of an astronomical object, not as it appears after passing through the atmosphere and telescope optics.
This is the first satellite carrying a light source capable of performing this experiment with this level of precision.
It is a proof-of-concept technology that in the future could be developed to be applicable in areas such as climate change, Earth observation and methane gas research, Doknjas said.
parrais@timescolonist.com
cjwilson@timescolonist.com
> Online: orcastat.ca/mission.