Aiding the aerospace industry through space instrumentation

Imagine you are an architect designing a one-of-a-kind bridge spanning Lake Ontario from Toronto to Rochester. You do some sketches and show them to a structural engineer, and he blithely responds, "Great. Fine. Give them to me, and I'll get back to you when the bridge is done."

If the scenario sounds far-fetched, then according to York University space scientist Gordon Shepherd, you never experienced the reality that was the foundation of university-based space engineering research in Canada prior to the year 2000.

"The old model was that the paper concept was done by the university and then as soon as a device got into hardware stage, the thing was given to industry," says Shepherd. It was a model dictated by the fact that university space research infrastructures received very little support from traditional government funding agencies.

"NSERC's approach was that you gave a professor research money with the idea he would do something good with it, even if it was only research using string and sealing wax technology," says Shepherd.

What York decided it wanted to do was create a new research model where the university actively developed the prototypes of technology to go into space. Then it would hand them off to industry when the machines that were actually going to fly were to be built.

This division of labour was an approach many U.S. universities and government research laboratories had already put in place - because it allowed professors and students to get genuine hands-on experience in space instrumentation creation. But it also reflected a deep truth about doing modern science: New technology doesn't just allow things to be better tested; new technology gives birth to innovation.

This modern paradigm underlies the philosophy of the CRESS Space Instrumentation Laboratory at York - a facility made possible through large infrastructure grants from, among others, Ontario Innovation Trust and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

"OIT and CFI's view was that you give people first-rate equipment and then see what they can do," says Shepherd about the paradigm shift.

What kind of learning tools are we talking about? One is a 1,600-kilogram force "equipment shaker", the shakes, rattles and vibrations of which can be programmed to simulate the teeth-clattering, apparatus-jarring effect a rocket liftoff will have on a device being launched into space.

Then there is a temperature-controlled vacuum chamber - designed to mimic the physics of space - that allows for testing of conditions that are quite literally out of this world. "On Earth if you want to cool something, you put a fan on it. If you do that in space, it just generates more heat," says Ben Quine, a space engineering professor at York. "So an awful lot of space design goes into designing the thermal properties of the instruments to make sure they're not going to get far too hot or far too cold."

Has the "innovation follows equipment" concept worked? Instead of industry feeling CRESS SIL is a competitor, the facility is now so well equipped that when its instruments are not being used in research, they have become a test bed for existing and newly forming Canadian aerospace companies.

For example, COM DEV, the largest Canadian-based designer of space subsystems, was recently using the vacuum chamber to make sure switches it is sending up on a $300 million U.S. mission aren't going to freeze or fry after launch. Another way of rating CRESS SIL's success is that university prototyping has lowered the cost of making devices. Quine points to the university's "microsizing" of an Argus spectrometer that can identify sources of air pollution at a range of one kilometre.

"This instrument costs $20,000 for us to launch into space. That's a lot less than the last set of comparable instruments from industry that cost about $3 million," he says proudly.

But universities are not just about building things, even if they are cool things that fly to Mars; they are about training people. York now offers the only Canadian undergraduate program in space engineering. And many of its students get to use the facility in their final year. What has emerged, says Quine, is a world-class educational cachet.

"People from all over the world are interested in coming here because it is uncommon to get this kind of integration between space science and engineering elsewhere," he remarks. Students come, they study and, he says, "Many stay."

That result is not a bridge across Lake Ontario, but a human talent bridge to the province of Ontario's economic future.