Dr. Eric Johnston is preparing to launch a satellite he helped create at the Nuclear Innovation Institute in Port Elgin, Ont., into space.
“For the last year and half, there was not the actual equipment that’s going to space, but the prototypes of them, being developed in our houses here in town,” said Johnston, the Nuclear Innovation Institute’s Chief Innovation Officer
Johnston, Dr. Andrei Hanu, a Senior Scientist at Bruce Power, and McMaster University’s Dr. Soo-Hyun Byun, have spent the past eight years designing and creating a satellite that could measure radiation in space.
To make trips to Mars possible, astronauts need to know what kind and dose of radiation they would endure.
The radiation detection device at the core of the satellite mimics human fat tissue, absorbing space radiation and reporting those measurements back to Earth.
“The Nuclear Innovation Institute and Bruce Power actually funded the development of the radiation detector itself, which has some use here terrestrially as well. So, it was like, ‘oh, we can create this really cool instrument that we’re going to use in space, and will bring us towards a detector that we can also use here on Earth’,” said Johnston.
The NEUDOSE nano-satellite, no bigger than a slice of bread, is hitching a ride aboard a Space X rocket to the International Space Station next week.
Johnston and his fellow scientists are heading to Florida to watch their creation launch into orbit.
“It’ll be a few months before it actually gets deployed. It’ll get sort of thrown out the back, for lack of a better term, from the space station, and that’s how it gets its orbit,” said Johnston.
Johnston says the NEUDOSE satellite will spend between nine months and two years in space transmitting radiation data back to McMaster, when it reaches line of sight, as it circles the globe.
“It’s just awesome that, that kind of work, can happen in a community like ours, of 17,000 residents, in rural Ontario. It’s amazing to think that we can be part of sending people to Mars,” said Saugeen Shores Mayor Luke Charbonneau.
The NEUDOSE satellite heads to the International Space Station on Tuesday, March 14. Shortly thereafter, a piece of technology created, designed, and funded in Bruce County, will be floating outside Earth’s atmosphere. Johnston said, he can’t wait.
