Skya'anaSat is a 3U CubeSat (a satellite 340 mm x 100 mm x 100 mm), that is designed and built in-house by students at the University of Victoria (UVic) Centre for Aerospace Research. Skya'anaSat also features major contributions by volunteers from the UVic Satellite Design engineering team.

Skya'anaSat is British Columbia’s submission to the Canadian Space Agency CubeSats Initiative in Canada for STEM (CUBICS) program.

The Skya'anaSat mission has two primary objectives:

1.) Train Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP) in space science and technology by providing an unrivaled, hands-on learning experience for undergraduate and graduate students. 

2.) Facilitate the University of Victoria Propagation Laboratory’s research into the correlation between the composition and structure of the ionosphere and human made climate change related activities.

All HQP involved in the project are university students (undergraduate and graduate) from UVic that contribute to Skya'anaSat by volunteering, or working full-time as part of co-operative education programs. Some members have graduated and continue to work full-time as researchers to gain further experience. Students gain experience in space science and technology by designing, manufacturing, testing, and operating a custom-built spacecraft to complete the science objective. Both the satellite and ground station are designed, assembled, tested, and operated by students.

Skya'anaSat will demonstrate a novel approach to ionospheric measurement through transionospheric sounding by satellite. Skya'anaSat space and ground segments are innovated, and entirely built by students (with the exception of the ADCS, which is provided by CubeSpace). This project builds off the successes of the previous ORCASat mission where alumni gained unique and extremely valuable hands-on experience from their contributions to the ORCASat project. Over 25 full time co-operative education students have gained experience from working on ORCASat. Over 150 part-time volunteer students have contributed to ORCASat and learned about space mission design. This number continues to grow with development on Skya’anaSat and following the satellite launch students will gain experience with day-to-day mission operations and flying the satellite. We are growing the next generation of Canadian space scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in British Columbia that will change the future of the space industry in Canada.

Currently, Skya’anaSat is in the final design stages of development. Assembly, integration and testing is expected to begin November 2024.

GRCON 2024, Knoxville, TN, USA

• Paper: 29 MHz LEO Satellite SDR LFM Radar for Citizen Ionospheric Science

• Talk: Modular CubeSat Radio, A New GNU Radio Compatible Open Source Modular SDR Platform for LEO Space Applications

• Lightning Talk: Increasing the Hermes Lite 2 TX Bandwidth

CASI ASTRO 2024, Toronto, ON, Canada

• Talk: Modular CubeSat Radio

• Talk: Evaluation of Alternative Battery Chemistries for Nanosatellite Applications