First Nova Scotia-made satellite launches into space

A tiny Nova Scotia invention made history Thursday as the first Atlantic Canadian satellite to be launched into space.

Weighing just 3.2 kilograms, the nanosatellite called LORIS, which stands for Low Orbit Reconnaissance and Imagery Satellite, is the first of its kind in the region to be designed, built and sent to space.

"When it was launched, it was just a sigh of relief,” said Arad Gharagozli, founder of the Dalhousie Space Systems Lab at the university’s Faculty of Engineering.

LORIS was deployed at 9:45 a.m. AST from NASA in Houston, Texas, alongside dozens of other satellites as part of the Canadian CubeSat Project.

Created by the Canadian Space Agency, the initiative provided funding to post-secondaries across the country for development and construction of small satellites for space.

“Building stuff for space is not easy,” said Tony Pellerin with the Canadian Space Agency. “The space environment is pretty harsh, so to make something that’s actually going to work in space requires a lot of knowledge while working through a lot of challenges.”

LORIS resembles a rectangular cube with small solar panels on the side housing a series of computer circuitry boards, stacked one upon the other.

Deployed at 400 kilometres above earth, the satellite is able to orbit the earth approximately every 90 minutes.

“A spacecraft at that altitude does about 16 rounds around the earth every day,” said Gharagozli.

The satellite’s onboard computer systems will send back data from space, along with images from two cameras.

Gharagozli is also president and CEO of Galaxia Mission Systems. His team will monitor the data from Halifax.

“Once the data comes back, we can actually go through it and see how these systems are performing and how we can make them better and how to improve them over time,” said Gharagozli.

Gharagozli says the future for space innovation in our region is bright.

“Now, you can look up and you always know that something you built is flying around earth,” said Gharagozli.