Young Canadians can test their skills and knowledge through the Canadian Space Agency’s Junior Astronauts campaign this fall with online activities in science and technology, fitness and nutrition, and teamwork and communications. The first activities were made available on the Junior Astronauts website in September, with more coming in October. Young Canadians who complete at least one activity in each of the streams can apply to take part in the CSA’s Junior Astronauts recruitment. Selected youth from across Canada will have the opportunity to go to the Canadian Space Agency in Saint-Hubert, Quebec for a week of training by astronauts, scientists and engineers. Junior Astronauts wanted! (Credit: Canadian Space Agency) Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen speaks to a student assembly in Bolton, Ontario. (Credit: Canadian Space Agency) By participating, teachers, educators and youth group leaders will have an opportunity to win a visit by an astronaut or space expert to their school or youth organization in spring 2020. All they have to do is register and complete at least one of the activities with a youth group in any of the proposed streams. The CSA will randomly select institutions from every province and territory. Visit the Junior Astronauts website to learn more and to register! You can also subscribe to an email list for timely updates about the... Read more

It has been 50 years since human missions to the Moon were shown not only to be possible, but to be successful! Recently, all the major space agencies in the world have committed to returning to the Moon within the next decade. In preparation for this, Western University and the University of Winnipeg successfully completed a lunar sample return analogue mission called CanMoon. This is a simulated rover mission that would return samples from the Moon’s surface as part of the Canadian Space Agency’s Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology – Lunar Exploration Analogue program. The mission ran from August 5-16th with a Mission Control based at Western University and a field analogue site in Lanzarote, Spain. The large-scale objectives for the mission are to build and maintain a group of qualified scientists and engineers in space-related areas in Canada for participation in upcoming real lunar missions; and to design an effective mission control operational structure to run near real-time, 24-hour lunar operations. The daily schedule of a lunar rover mission will require continuous hands-on personnel and will be very data intensive as there is only a few seconds delay in Earth-Moon communications. The project is directed by principal investigators Dr. Gordon Osinski (UWO) and Dr. Ed Cloutis (UW); and operations are managed by Cassandra Marion, a PhD candidate at Western. The CanMoon team consists of 56 people including a range of analogue mission veterans and novices from the fields of engineering, geology, planetary science, environmental science, astrobiology, etc. Forty-one participants are undergraduate and graduate students studying in Canada, among which many aspire to participate in real missions. Cassandra Marion Cassandra Marion is the Mission Operations Manager for the CanMoon analogue mission; her 14th analogue mission experience. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Geology - Planetary Science at Western University. Her studies focus on impact cratering at lunar and martian analogue sites in Arctic Canada. Outside of research she is an outdoor adventurer, volleyball player and aspiring multilingual. During the CanMoon mission, the team successfully collected and returned 7 samples from Lanzarote. They are now hard at work analyzing samples and validating their rover interpretations. But more than that, they strive to be the future leaders in Canadian lunar missions.   CanMoon’s Mission Control is run by a Planning Team who command the rover to drive and collect data, in addition to a Tactical Science and a Science Interpretation Team whom decide on scientific sites of interest to target and interpret the returned results. In this simulation, the rover is operated by a small team of students pretending to be the rover. The rover’s landing site, Lanzarote Spain, is a relatively young volcanic island and is an environment analogous to the Schrödinger impact basin on the lunar far side.   Left to right: CanMoon field team at work in Lanzarote; Science Room at Western University; Planning Room at Western University... Read more

           Over a dozen federal departments will use RCM data to provide services to Canadians. (Credit: CSA) After 15 years of hard work on Canada’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), the trio of satellites was launched successfully into space on the foggy California morning of June 12, 2019, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The RCM will take daily scans of Canada’s vast territory and waters, day or night and in all kinds of weather conditions. The constellation will provide daily access to 90% of the world’s surface and will be able to pass over the Arctic up to four times a day. The RCM is also equipped with an Automatic Identification System, which will allow for improved detection and tracking of ships, including those conducting illegal fishing and other illicit activities. After 15 years of hard work on Canada’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), the trio of satellites was launched successfully into space on the foggy California morning of June 12, 2019, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The RCM will take daily scans of Canada’s vast territory and waters, day or night and in all kinds of weather conditions. The constellation will provide daily access to 90% of the world’s surface and will be able to pass over the Arctic up to four times a day. The RCM is also equipped with an Automatic Identification System, which will allow for improved detection and tracking of ships, including those conducting illegal fishing and other illicit activities. The RADARSAT Constellation Mission launched aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. (Credit: SpaceX) For more than two decades, Canada’s world-leading RADARSAT satellites have been providing scientists, government and industry with crucial and continuous data for a wide variety of uses. RCM data will also be used in innovative applications that benefit Canadians, such as: Monitoring climate change, land use evolution and even human impacts on the environment by highlighting changes over time through composite images. Helping emergency teams save lives during natural disasters. Creating ice maps for safer ship navigation and commercial maritime transportation. Monitoring the integrity of infrastructure like highways, bridges and railway corridors. Measuring changes in permafrost and ground movement to support northern communities, build houses and infrastructure safely, and plan airport runways and their operation and maintenance. Maximizing crop yields for farmers while reducing energy consumption and the use of potential pollutants. Supporting the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces to further global peace and security.     MDA Ltd., a Maxar company, is the prime contractor for the project. As such, it is responsible for the design, construction and testing of the spacecraft, which was mainly done out of their facility in the Montreal area. In total, 125 suppliers across 7 Canadian provinces played a role in the project. (Credit: CSA)... Read more

Young lunar craters identified using the Diviner instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter allowed scientists to make a fascinating discovery about the bombardment history of the Moon and Earth. (Credits: Ernie Wright/NASA Goddard) Most scientists believe that the bombardment rate on the Moon and Earth has remained constant in the past ~2-3 billion years. The common assumption has been that the Earth’s crater record is heavily biased and the rarity of young craters on Earth (300-660 million years) is due to preservation bias, for example, being erased by erosion or tectonics. To test this idea, scientists have compared the Earth’s cratering record to that of the Moon.        Dr. Sara Mazrouei is a planetary scientist, educator, and science communicator. She is currently the Space Matters Lead at Western University’s Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration. Her PhD research at the University of Toronto focused on the recent bombardment history of the Moon.     Dr. Mazrouei and colleagues used a new method to determine the ages of lunar craters, using temperature data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Diviner instrument. Young craters with numerous meter-sized fragments are easy to pick out from older craters with eroded fragments. As time goes by, these large rocks are broken down by future small impactors. Eventually, over the course of about a billion years, all of the rocks form into regolith, providing an inverse relationship between rock abundance (the rockiness of a crater’s ejecta) and crater age. As craters get older, they become less rocky. Using this relationship, they dated all craters larger than 10 km in diameter and younger than 1 billion years old on the surface of the Moon. The ages of these craters revealed that the bombardment rate on the Moon has increased by a factor of 2.6 in the past 290 million years. Dr. Mazrouei and colleagues used a new method to determine the ages of lunar craters, using temperature data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Diviner instrument. Young craters with numerous meter-sized fragments are easy to pick out from older craters with eroded fragments. As time goes by, these large rocks are broken down by future small impactors. Eventually, over the course of about a billion years, all of the rocks form into regolith, providing an inverse relationship between rock abundance (the rockiness of a crater’s ejecta) and crater age. As craters get older, they become less rocky. Using this relationship, they dated all craters larger than 10 km in diameter and younger than 1 billion years old on the surface of the Moon. The ages of these craters revealed that the bombardment rate on the Moon has increased by a factor of 2.6 in the past 290 million years. Using rock abundance data from the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter to determine ages for lunar craters. (Credit: Rebecca Ghent, University of Toronto and Thomas Gernon, University of Southampton)... Read more

Looking towards the centre of Gale crater, Mastcam mosaic showing the APXS pointing up, at the end of the robotic arm (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) Dr. Lucy Thompson   Dr. Lucy Thompson is a geologist/planetary scientist at the Planetary and Space Science Centre, University of New Brunswick. She came to Canada for her PhD studies and first foray into planetary geology in 1991, studying the Sudbury meteorite impact structure in Ontario. She has since studied other terrestrial, martian and lunar craters and geology, as well as meteorites. This experience led to her becoming a member of the APXS and MSL Science teams in 2011. The APXS is located on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm and is placed in contact with, or close to, a rock, sand or soil sample, or pointing away from the surface for an atmospheric measurement. It bombards the area of interest with X-rays and alpha particles, causing the sample to emit characteristic x-rays that reveal its detailed chemical makeup. The APXS is compact, simple to operate, requiring very little power or uplinked data and generating low downlink data volume products, making it ideally suited to landed planetary mission payloads. After nearly 7 years and more than 20 km of roving in Gale crater on Mars, the MSL Curiosity APXS instrument has acquired more than 750 individual chemical analyses of rocks, sand, soil, dust and the atmosphere. In concert with the 9 other instruments on the Curiosity payload, it has been key in discoveries regarding the geological history of the Gale crater landing area as well as the martian crust in general. These have included; recognition of a past environment at Gale that could have sustained life, as well as extending the compositional range of crustal materials so far found on Mars. The Canadian-built and operated APXS continues to play a pivotal role in the exploration of Gale crater. As Curiosity continues to climb the rock layers that comprise the central mound, the APXS will provide key chemical information regarding changes in the martian environment through time as the rocks were formed. Navcam left photo of APXS analyzing the “Kilmarie” drill target prior to drilling on Sol 2382. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) The APXS team during landing, August... Read more