UVic student-built satellite to study climate change after launching on SpaceX rocket

A student-built satellite from the University of Victoria is preparing for launch with a dual mission: studying how climate change is affecting Earth’s upper atmosphere while making satellite technology more accessible to researchers and amateur radio enthusiasts around the world.

The shoebox-sized MARMOTSat, developed by Uvic’s Centre for Aerospace Research {CfAR) and the UVic Satellite Design Team, is scheduled to launch in July aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The satellite has already been inteagrade into its deployment canister at the Canadian Space Agency and is expected to reach orbit and deploy within hours of liftoff.

Once in space, MARMOTSat will collect data on the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere that affects radio communications, GPS signals and satellite navigation.

Researchers say they’re particularly interested in understanding how the ionosphere is changing as a result of human-caused climate change, an area that remains poorly understood.

The satellite’s second mission is aimed at the global amateur radio community.

UVic says the roughly $500,000 communications system aboard MARMOTSat will be released as fully open-source, allowing both researchers and hobbyists to build on the technology rather than designing their own satellite radio systems from scratch.

“What we’re open-sourcing is the spacecraft radio itself,” said Blake Baldwin, an electrical designer with CfAR’s Space Division and former president of the UVic Satellite Design Team. “This means that other university teams, research groups, or hobbyists can take what we’ve built and use it as a starting point, instead of designing a satellite radio system completely from scratch.”

Back in 2022, the university’s first CubeSat launched from the Kennedy Space Center and proved that the UVic team could successfullly design, build and operate its own satellite, researcher said.

A third mission, dubbed SolarLink, is already planned for 2027 and will test high-speed communications technologies designed to improve connectivity across Canada’s Arctic.

“A single satellite teaches you a great deal, but it doesn’t build a sector,” said CfAR director and mechanical engineering professor Afzal Suleman.

“What we’re constructing is a sustainable and comprehensive space engineering program where one mission informs the design and ambition of the next, so that the expertise, infrastructure and people we develop and train stay here and keep compounding, rather than dispersing once a single project concludes.”

Earlier this year, UVic also received $5.4 million in federal funding from Pacific Economic Development Canada, including $4 million to help establish a Western Canadian cluster focused on space-enabled industries.

A small group of UVic researchers and students plans to watch the launch in California alongside officials from the Canadian Space Agency, while others will gather on campus to follow SpaceX’s livestream.

The team expects to know within hours of launch whether MARMOTSat has successfully deployed into orbit.