When the topic of Canadian space contributions comes up, there is one thing that almost everyone will surely know about: the Canadarm. Even now, 35 years after the first arm was delivered to NASA, it is the most celebrated Canadian space achievement. In November 2012, Google Canada displayed a Canadarm-themed doodle celebrating its first deployment on the Space Shuttle Columbia in November 1981. The current $5 bill depicts the Canadarm2, a similar device that represents a substantial amount of the Canadian contribution to the International Space Station. The Canadarms are remarkable devices that have served their space shuttles and orbiting space stations well, but there is more to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) than that.
It should probably be noted outright that the projects that the CSA is currently leading and supporting are not super flashy and exciting; to leave it unsaid would be skirting an important point. The CSA is not currently controlling a flotilla of robots on the surface of another world. Nor is it landing on a comet or whizzing past Pluto. What it is doing is supporting the global space industry, making new technologies that others will use, and providing important services to Canadian scientists to conduct space-related experiments.
One of the aforementioned services the CSA supplies is parabolic flights. Famously used in the NASA “Vomit Comet” program, parabolic fights provide a short-duration microgravity environment inside of a plane. They work by having a plane climb quickly through the air, throwing the occupants upwards. The plane then makes a parabolic arc, following the trajectory that the occupants take under gravity alone. In other words, the passengers free-fall through the sky while the plane adjusts its speed to follow their path. The result is 20 second of weightlessness, during which experiments ranging from materials science to fluid dynamics can take place. The CSA has three planes for the purpose; a KC-135 and an Airbus A300 that can each carry a dozen experiments at a time, and a smaller Falcon 20. In any case, the planes fly tens of parabolas over the course of a few hours, giving researchers time to conduct their experiments.
Another project supported by the CSA is the “iRings” project from McGill University. This project, which gets its name from the Iron Rings that obliged engineers all across Canada wear, has designed a wheel suitable for use on a lunar rover. The wheel has chain-mail integrated into its structure to provide durability and puncture support and is filled with granular particles instead of air. This design has several advantages, not least of which is the inherent shock-damping characteristics. This damping would allow a rover to use smaller shocks, saving weight—something that is always a limiting factor on spacecraft.
One final project that the CSA takes on is that of stratospheric balloons. Much like the parabolic flight program, this is a service that the CSA offers to scientists who need to perform high-altitude experiments. Stratospheric balloons are most-frequently though of as weather balloons, but they can be a platform for all sorts of data acquisition and experimentation. They travel up to 42 km into the atmosphere and remain there for up to 10 hours, with longer-duration tests currently under consideration. The balloon plummets to Earth while its scientific payload parachutes down. According to the CSA website, these balloons offer a unique ability to study the stratosphere since it is “too low for satellites, too high for aircraft and cleared too quickly by rockets.”
These are just a few of the many projects that the CSA is involved in. Some of these, and other, projects are sure to reap great economic and scientific rewards. While the Canadarm may remain Canada’s most prestigious foray into space, it is hardly the only one.
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