More than 100 University of Saskatchewan students have worked over the course of the last three years on creating the province’s first cube satellite. Dustin Preece, the Technical Project Manager for the RADSAT-SK satellite says at the beginning of December, the team welcomed four Canadian Space Agency engineers to the university to see the team’s design and the facilities at the U of S. “We got some very valuable feedback from them for how we can be going forward most effectively and just kind of troubleshot a couple of different things like technical issues that we’re coming into, but that’s kind of par for the course.”

Originally the plan was to launch the satellite in December of 2022, although the Canadian Space Agency asked the USask team if they could speed up their timeline by a few months and have the satellite ready for April with an expected launch date sometime this upcoming August. “They (CSA) asked us to see if we could do it a little bit quicker just so they could space out the groups a little bit more. We got a quite a bit to do in the next few months to meet that goal. We’re optimistic we can do it but things do have to right in order to make that deadline as we’re going to be pushing things a bit,” says Preece.

While the satellite is in space for its one-year voyage, the RADSAT-SK unit will use a new kind of radiation sensor and test an experimental radiation blocking compound, both of which were developed by USask researchers.

RADSAT-SK is a joint project between the USST, The University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Polytechnic, and the Canadian Space Agency. Once it launches, it will become Saskatchewan’s first satellite in space.