Dr. David Naylor (University of Lethbridge)

By Justin Goulet

U of L astrophysicists receive major infrastructure grant to further space exploration

Aug 23, 2020 | 9:00 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – Astrophysicists at the University of Lethbridge have gotten a nice boost from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

The CFI has provided a $250,000 grant that will go toward the development of a cryogenic test facility to evaluate the performance of instruments destined for space exploration.

The Astronomical Instrumentation Group (AIG) will be building a liquid-helium free cryostat and cryogenic translation stage that will be used to develop and test the world’s first cryogenic, far-Infrared, post-dispersed polarizing Fourier transform spectrometer.

“In the simplest way, it’s [the funding] going towards a fridge, a bigger fridge than we currently have. This is a special fridge that is able to cool to temperatures 10 times colder than the universe can be. The Big Bang radiation is 3 Kelvin, so we get actually get down to 0.3 Kelvin,” explained Dr. David Naylor, leader of the AIG.

Dr. Naylor is also a board of governors’ research chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the U of L. He said the reason they are doing this work is that for any space exploration missions, all instruments must be cooled down in order to avoid transmission interruptions.

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“Everything emits radiation,” he said.

“You have to cool your instrumentation down to extremely low temperatures. In order to build and test an instrument destined for space, you have to prove that it will survive the space environment with especially low amounts of electricity available to power things, and you need the facility to do that.”

Dr. Naylor said the AIG had won a CFI award years ago to build a similar system, but it is not able to contain the size of instruments they’re now looking to test.

EXPLORING THE MOON

He said the work done at the U of L is very important going forward, with Canada being a founding members of the international Lunar Gateway project – aimed at exploring the Moon.

“The Moon is really cold. The Moon orbits the Earth every 28 days so it’s nighttime on the Moon for 14 days, so it gets really cold. It actually gets to about minus 250 [degrees] Celsius. So, one of the challenges on the Moon is to survive the cold night,” Dr. Naylor said.

“It’s cold in Lethbridge in winter, but nothing like the Moon [and] we have the only facility in Canada capable of testing that.”

He said any company that wants to send something to the Moon must show that it can survive extremely cold temperatures.

“We think that will require any instrument to come through Lethbridge.”

The fridge will be set up in the U of L’s Science Commons building.

“Our coolers require compressors, just like your fridge in the kitchen, you’ll hear the compressor whirring when it’s cooling. Our compressors are monstrous things and they’re located in the penthouse – the very upper part of the science building and then the fridge lines run down into our labs,” Dr. Naylor told Lethbridge News Now.

“We’re 10 times more efficient now than we were when we were located in University Hall, say 10 years ago. That’s the impact of the first fridge we got and why the CFI gave us the award that they did for this one, they realize what we’re up to.”

He estimates it could take up to a year to get the fridge installed, but he’s hoping it could come sooner.

FUTURE EXPLORERS

Dr. Naylor said this project is not only a boost for the team at the U of L, but for all Canadians, including potential future explorers.

“When I was growing up, the astronauts were going to the Moon and that was a huge deal. We haven’t gone back there, but we will. The U.S., Canada, Europe, they’ve all signed up to go back,” he said.

“Canada’s put a lot of money in and in return for that, they get guaranteed seats on a lunar landing, so we will have Canadian people on the ground and they’ll be in elementary schools, so the outreach of this is really kind of useful to get kids excited about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and thinking about the future, and we want to be part of that, too – delivering things to the Moon.”

In addition to this latest $250,000 funding, $360,000 has already been secured from four industrial partners that are all active in the space exploration sector.

Those partners are ABB out of Quebec City, Blue Sky Spectroscopy in Lethbridge, QMC Instruments in Cardiff, Wales and the Space Research Organization of the Netherlands in Groningen.

The research team will apply for matching funds from the province later in the year, boosting the total value of the project to $860,000.