SAIT engineering students designing drone to collect space junk

Supernova team members Sam Relja, Kylan Mazak and Ethan Good look over the drone they designed that could one day orbit the earth and collect space junk. (CTV News)

A team of students from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) is working on an out-of-this-world project, to try and cut down on the amount of debris in space.

The SAIT Supernovas is made up of five students who are passionate about space engineering.

The team is made up of Ethan Good (electronics engineering technology), Isaac Richardson (mechanical engineering technology), Samuel Relja (Supernovas founder and mechanical engineering technology), Leif Teigen (mechanical engineering technology), and Kylan Mazak (electronics engineering technology).

The team was formed with one goal: to create an unmanned, electrically powered craft or drone, that can function in a microgravity environment with just nine months to design, develop and build it along with the ionic thrust system to provide propulsion and control of the vehicle.

"The drone itself, it contains eight channels of high voltage which power thrusters," said Ethan Good, an 18-year-old second-year student.

"Which in layman's terms, it just uses a really high potential to create kind of a thrust using electricity."

Good says one of the big challenges is flying in microgravity and their solution was to make a mechanical gyroscope to provide stabilization by establishing an inertial reference to ensure precise maneuverability in the unique conditions of zero gravity. 

"Without that stability in zero gravity, we will just kind of like bounce around and not have any inertial point of reference to stay level on," he said.

The purpose of the drone would be to see if it's possible for a large version of it to collect debris in space.

That idea came from Sam Relja, who founded the team but is also its chief designer and propulsion lead. Relja knows someone who had a close call with falling space junk.

"They were flying with a client (in a) chartered aircraft and a piece of space debris came hurtling to the windshield of the aircraft and they had to make an emergency landing," he said.

"Over the decades, we have sent so many things up into space and once those systems break and become derelict, there's no way to fix them so they just sit there."

The Supernovas took their drone to Montreal in July where they were the first non-university team to participate in the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment Design Challenge (CAN-RGX), a nationwide microgravity research competition for post-secondary students.

The event was hosted by Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) and operated in partnership with the National Research Council (NRC) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

"I think especially in nine months, for anyone who knows the (research and development) landscape, we have to be proud of ourselves for that," said Relja.

"It still baffles me that we were able to take this idea and even after all of the iterations and all of the idea changes and all the testing and analytics that we had to do to determine what would work, what wouldn't, what was feasible, what wasn't, to know that we actually completed what we set out for and designing what we intended and building and testing what we intended."

The annual event fosters the growth of STEM skills in students and also offers unique opportunities for participants to conduct groundbreaking research in a microgravity environment, fostering innovation and learning beyond Earth's confines.

Kylan Mazak, a 19-year-old second-year student, worked on all the electrical components of the craft.

"This was an amazing experience in the sense that we had to solicit sponsors for our budget," he said.

"We had to worry about every aspect, and then even working as an electronics engineer, working with mechanical engineers and collaborating towards a final result and actually seeing that come to fruition was extremely motivating."

The Supernovas had the opportunity to test their creation in microgravity in the last week of July onboard the National Research Council's Falcon 20 plane, known as the vomit-comet because the rollercoaster-like flight simulates microgravity and passengers can get queasy quickly from the experience.

Mazak would like to see the project continue by doing more testing in the aircraft.

"There are a lot of hours put into it and just seeing it be used for what it was intended for at the end and seeing a final result working is always very highly motivating," he said.

There isn’t an official winner of CAN-RGX, but the team says the experience was positive and they made a big impression on organizers. 

Learn more about the project on the SAIT Supernovas' website.