McMaster’s first satellite heading into orbit to measure harmful space radiation

McMaster University's first satellite is currently in Florida, but not for a beach vacation.

The radiation-detecting mini satellite, NEUDOSE, short for neutron dosimetry and exploration, is at Kennedy Space Center, waiting to be loaded onto the SpaceX rocket that will be taking it to the International Space Station (ISS)," said operations team leader Taren Ginter.

That upcoming launch, presently set for March 14, is over eight years in the making. The idea was conceived in January 2015, Ginter said, meaning generations of Mac students across the sciences, engineering, math and medical fields have had a hand in bringing the project to fruition. She estimates over 150 people have been involved in the project; a huge number of students" plus industry partners and external sponsors.

NEUDOSE has been such a long time coming, McMaster Interdisciplinary Satellite Team were fundraising, seeking over $100,000, before funding arrived in 2018 with Canadian Space Agency's (CSA) CubeSat project.

The CSA project offered students and professors across Canada the opportunity to design and build their own standard-sized mini satellites to be sent into space for real missions.

The years since have been a huge learning experience for students, but NEUDOSE is just starting.

After spending a month or two on the ISS, astronauts will deploy the satellite into low Earth orbit and once it's deployed, the satellite will be turned on and measurements will be transmitted to the ground station which is here at McMaster," Ginter says. At that point we will have the operation of the satellite ... collecting measurements and collecting data that will be coming in for analysis until the end of the satellite's lifespan." A lifespan, she estimates, that could be as much as three years, but hopefully one year at least.

NEUDOSE's primary scientific goal is to learn about the environment outside of Earth's atmosphere in order to help develop technology to protect astronauts.

The space exploration industry is looking at longer deep-space missions and space radiation has a huge health risk for astronauts," including cancer and damage to the central nervous system, among other things, Ginter says. These things have to be mitigated to protect the astronauts' health and before we can do that, we need to understand the dose they're actually receiving, which is where we come in," she added.

NEUDOSE has novel radiation-detecting technology called CNP-TEPC that looks at both charged and neutral particles. That payload," Ginter says, measures radiation as it passes through the shoe box-sized satellite."

If successful, it would be great if NEUDOSE could become a standard radiation instrument on future missions" Ginter said.

Jeremy Kemeny is a Hamilton-based web editor at The Spectator. Reach him via email: jkemeny@thespec.com