The Final Frontier
SARA LAUX | SEPTEMBER 16, 2018
The final frontier in space travel isn’t a place — it’s dealing with the limitations of the human body beyond earth. Now, Mac alumni, students and professors are developing technology to help do that — and they’re taking their work into space to test it out.
In 2014, Andrei Hanu ’13 had an idea. He was working on a postdoc at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, building on the work he’d done previously with Soo Hyun Byun, his supervisor in McMaster’s Radiation Sciences — Medical Physics PhD program.
Fully 20 per cent of his time at NASA was to come up with “gamechanging technology” — and he decided that to truly change the rules of that game he had to address one of the basic limitations of space exploration: the human body. Biologically, humans really, really aren’t meant to be in space. Space is a vacuum, so not only is there no air to breathe, but the almost total absence of atmospheric pressure means that, without protection, the body’s fluids will literally boil. (Not surprisingly, death follows in about a minute.)
Our cells are also inconveniently sensitive to the effects of radiation, of which there are two main types: ionizing and nonionizing. Ionizing radiation can have enough energy to knock electrons out of their orbit around a cell’s nucleus, which in turn can damage DNA, leading to nasty long-term effects like cancer, cataracts and central nervous system difficulties.
While humans are exposed to many types of ionizing radiation on earth — in X-rays, for example, and in the environment naturally — our everyday exposure doesn’t tend to be problematic, partly because nuclear catastrophes like the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are uncommon, and partly because the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field help protect us from the worst effects of radiation from space.
“I wanted to develop something that would solve a problem.”
- Andrei Hanu ’13, Bruce Power senior scientist
Go beyond the earth’s protective sphere, though — say, to the moon or, eventually, to Mars — and radiation becomes a much, much bigger problem. That’s because both the type and the amount of radiation the human body receives in space are particularly nasty.
There are three kinds of space radiation: galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), solar particles that come from the sun during solar flares, and radiation trapped by the earth’s magnetic field. All are dangerous, but about 50 per cent of the radiation dose that an astronaut receives in space is made up of neutrons, which are created when GCRs interact with the earth’s upper atmosphere and break into smaller particles.
Neutrons aren’t directly ionizing themselves, but they’re harmful because they act like tiny billiard balls, hitting an atom and indirectly causing ionization.
The key to reducing risk, then, is not just to track radiation exposure as a whole, but break down exposure by type and amount. A little neutron radiation may not be a bad thing. A lot could be disastrous.
Hanu, who’s now a senior scientist with Bruce Power, knew that tracking neutron exposure in real time would be key to keeping space explorers safe — and he also knew that this wasn’t an easy proposition.
“Conventionally, the instruments that were required to measure neutrons in space were very heavy — up to 50 kilograms, and using 600 watts of power,” he explains. “You can’t use those instruments for personal dosimetry. I wanted to develop something that would solve that problem.”
His idea: build a small satellite that could measure the type and amount of radiation an astronaut was receiving, and transmit that info in real time to a control station.
The project was more than he could tackle on his own while at NASA, so he reached out to two people who could help him: Fiona McNeill, the director of McMaster’s Radiation Sciences program — familiarly known as RadGrad — and Byun, his PhD supervisor and a professor of physics and astronomy.
Hanu knew that they had the knowledge, the resources and a supply of students interested in applying classroom knowledge to a real-life project.
It took him three hours to build up the nerve to send McNeill and Byun an email. The subject line was “Do you want to help me build a satellite?”
And yes, they did.
From the satellite’s function — NEUtron DOSimetry and Exploration — its name was chosen: NEUDOSE.
“We’re at the start of a new age of exploration.”
– Fiona McNeill, director, graduate program in Radiation Sciences and Healthand Radiation Physics.
Hanu plastered Mac with posters asking for student volunteers, worried — needlessly — that no one would show up to the informa- tional meeting, held on January 30, 2015, a date he says he’ll never forget.
Almost 100 students turned up, from a range of disciplines including engineering, life sciences and physics.
“That was one of the most exciting and nerve-wracking moments in my life, presenting to all these students this crazy idea I’d cobbled to- gether,” says Hanu. “This would be McMaster’s first satellite — we’d be learning how to build spacecraft together.”
Three years later, the satellite now has a communication system. It has instrumentation that detects both neutrons and charged particles. It has a ground station that, this past spring, demonstrated it could communicate with satellites already in orbit. Its materials can withstand extreme changes of pressure and temperature.
All this — the designing, the fabrication, the construction and the testing — is the result of work by almost 40 students across 11 teams, mostly undergraduates, with a few grad students and alumni thrown in for good measure. The work has been done in spaces and labs across campus and beyond, including the new Learning Factory in the basement of the Engineering Technology Building, where much of the fabrication took place.
And while there’s a group of supervising investigators, including McNeill, Byun, Hanu, engineering technology professor Ishwar Singh and Bubble Technology Industries research scientist Eric Johnston, the project has been student-driven ever since Hanu’s first informational meeting. Given the amount of work involved, it may seem surprising that so many students were willing to combine intensive extra-curricular work on NEUDOSE with already demanding class work. Not really, says Anthony Mansour ’18, a recent graduate of the Automotive Engineering Technology program and the former lead for the ground station team.
“Being able to apply what we learned in class to a project outside of class was one of the most rewarding things about the project,” he says. “Getting good marks is a way to show what you’ve learned — this is a way to prove yourself.”
For Erica Dao, the skills she’s learned as NEUDOSE’s overall project manager go far beyond anything she’s working on in her PhD research in Radiation Sciences Medical Physics and while that research is unrelated to space radiation, that hasn’t stopped her from devoting three solid years to getting NEUDOSE off the ground.
“This project has been beneficial in so many unexpected ways — we’re taking our expertise from our studies at McMaster and applying them to a different field in a totally new way,” she says. “Along with incredible technical skills, we’re learning soft skills as well: we present every major design to the team and critically analyze and discuss it together. Every system in the group has a team leader, so we practise leadership skills. We’ve learned so much along the way.”
And they’re continuing to learn, as NEUDOSE undergoes more and more rigorous testing.
The satellite has already travelled more than 100,000 feet above the earth as part of NASA’s High-Altitude Student Platform (HASP) program at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which flies student-built payloads on high-altitude balloons at heights almost four times that of Mount Everest. Last year, the team — one of 12 teams from across the globe selected for the program — tested the satellite’s radiation detector on the balloon. This fall, another team will participate in the HASP program again, testing the satellite’s communication system by chasing the balloon on the ground as it flies across New Mexico. “HASP is an important part of the project, because we believe in the philosophy of ‘test as you fly,’” explains Hanu. “Testing in the environment you’re ultimately going to be flying in is a key to a successful mission.”
Following the early successes of the satellite, the group had planned to fundraise to launch NEUDOSE into orbit privately — but although the group has seen generous sponsorship from a number of entities, including Bruce Power, Altium Inc., the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the CANDU Owners’ Group, Keysight Technologies and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, launch services run about $200,000: a hefty price tag for any university project. Then, in the spring of 2018, the group heard from the Canadian Space Agency — NEUDOSE had been selected as one of 15 projects in the CSA’s Canadian CubeSat project. In 2021, the satellite will travel to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and be launched and deployed by the Canadarm.
After more than three years of hard work — of designing, redesigning, fabricating, retesting, retesting and more testing — that announcement, which the group watched live at McMaster’s LIVELab, marked a serious accomplishment for the team and catapulted the project into real-life mode.
“People almost cried when they heard the announcement,” says Byun. “And now, the project is real — the timelines are fixed and we can’t have any delays. It’s great experience.”
And while the project — with its emphasis on missions to Mars and beyond — seems futuristic, for Fiona McNeill it’s simply the next step in a long, long history of exploration.
“It’s rather like the start of the 15th century, when the first ships went out across the oceans and Magellan went around the world,” she says. “Humans are about to leave the planet, looking to send missions to Mars. We’re at the start of a new age of exploration.”
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