University of Alberta satellite headed into orbit to help track wildfires
“A lot of us are space enthusiasts who want to make some sort of contribution as well as learn about space industry."
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Some students at the University of Alberta will be shifting their gaze skyward this week as they watch a satellite they built get shuttled into space.
A SpaceX rocket due to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Tuesday will carry a small cube satellite created by members of AlbertaSat, a student club that designs, builds and operates satellites, the university said Friday.
Dubbed Ex-Alta 2, the satellite is designed to orbit the planet and keep an eye on wildfires — a project inspired by the 2016 Fort McMurray blaze, said Pundeep Hundal, deputy systems team lead on the project.
“It’s really exciting for us to see that satellite, which was just a design on paper two years ago, getting to a point where it’s actually operational,” said Hundal, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at the university.
“With it finally being put into space, we can now move on to the next stage of this mission.”
The two-kilogram satellite, about the size of a loaf of bread, is equipped with a multispectral imager, which functions as a kind of camera that captures data from Earth using infrared and visible light, the team states on the project website.
The imager, called “Iris,” will track high-risk zones for clues about where wildfires could start, watch smoke to identify active fires, and monitor burned zones for vegetation growth to glean data about post-fire recovery.
Hundal said he’s joining several AlbertaSat members travelling to the Florida launch site, where they will watch their project take flight.
“A lot of us are space enthusiasts who want to make some sort of contribution as well as learn about the space industry,” he said.
A livestream of the Tuesday launch can be viewed on NASA’s website at about 6:30 p.m. MDT.
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