ORCA2Sat Spacecraft

Calibrate optical and radio observatories in to reduce uncertainties in measurements of the Universe expansion rate.

The primary mission of ORCASat is student education and highly qualified personnel training in aerospace engineering through having university students at the undergraduate and graduate level undertake a real life satellite mission.

Secondary mission: The purpose of the secondary mission is to provide requirements and constraints to the construction of ORCASat, and expose students to the process of designing a satellite meeting them. This makes the primary mission a much more valuable learning experience by making the project resemble what is done in industry.

The secondary mission is an optical calibration light source in low Earth orbit that will be used by research and educational groups to calibrate ground based optical telescopes. Calibration of these telescopes will be used to remove uncertainties on photometric measurements caused by the attenuation of Earth’s atmosphere. By placing a known light source above the atmosphere, information about the light source can be downlinked to the telescope as seen from the satellite and compared to the telescopic measurements.

Develop and test new advancements in technology to better understand “dark energy,” an enigmatic form of energy making up 75% of the universe believed to cause the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Operating with two payloads, ORCA2Sat will calibrate a number of both optical and radio observatories in an effort to reduce uncertainties associated with measurements of the universal expansion rate. These calibrated measurements may provide new insights into the nature of dark energy and the universal expansion rate.

Deployed into low earth orbit from the International Space Station in December 2022. The UVic team was able to contact the satellite almost immediately after deployment and operated the satellite for six months before atmospheric re-entry in July 2023. The mission was a success, giving many students unparalleled experience, and space qualifying a student-built satellite bus and ground station which will serve the University of Victoria for future satellite missions.

In the first batch deployment, ORCASat ground station quickly communication with the satellite within the pass. Using the onboard GPS telemetry, the team could use that info to cross calibrate with the TLE released on space-track.org. The team managed to maintain daily operations with the satellite until it deorbited less than 7 months later. One technical problem took the team almost four months to diagnose the issue and came up with a workaround solution. The team noticed that the magnetometer was turned off frequently which required a reboot of the ADCS computer. It turned out it was due to interference from the UHF transmissions that caused the I2C bus communications between the ADCS computer and the magnetometer disrupted. LORIS team encountered technical issues with its ground station and could establish communications occasionally.

One of 15 winners of Canadian CubeSat Project.

• SUN SENSOR - Hyperion SS200
• RWS - Sinclair RW-0.03

• Magnetometer – ST LSM9DS1
• Gyroscope – ST LSM9DS1

• DANTESat
• HSKSAT
• LORIS
• NutSat
• OPTIMAL-1
• ORCA2Sat
• SS-1
• MARIO
• PetitSat
• SPORT
• TJREVERB
• Astrocast 17
• Astrocast 18
• Astrocast 19
• Astrocast 20
• Thybolt-1
• Thybolt-2