Our Facilities
We acknowledge that we are on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another.
The Team Room and Clean Room
The RADSAT-SK and RADSAT-SK2 projects were built in the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team team room out of the Hardy Lab in the College of Engineering. This space contains a clean room, built and run by members of SkCubeSat. The clean room is essential, as satellites contain many sensitive components that can become damaged, degraded and suffer operational issues when contaminated. In addition to microscopic particles and foreign substances, electrostatic discharge (static) can cause electrical shorts which can render the component unusable. This clean space is also temperature and humidity controlled to ensure the parts reliability, alignment, and thermal management to avoid condensation and corrosion. With our functioning clean room allows us to test and verify the functionality and the performance of all the satellites components, integration and final structure and system.
The Ground Station
The ground station is the communication hub between the satellite and the team. The transmission of data and signals moves in both directions. From the ground station, commands are sent to the satellite to send information back. The information can be in the form of scientific data or measurements, earth images, and telecommunications. Other data called telemetry can be collected, which includes position, performance, and system health. The ground station is critical to plan communication passes and to encrypt the data received to maintain integrity and confidentiality of information.
