OTTAWA — When Nathalie Nguyen-Quoc Ouellette was young, she didn’t see many stars in the bright sky above Montreal. But he would look over the colorful, eerie images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and dream of becoming an astrophysicist. “I really fell in love with space and astronomy,” he said. “There is so much to discover.” Today, the associate director of the Trottier Institute for Exoplanet Research at the Université de Montréal as a scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, a role that sees her connect his scientific team with the general public and the children he hopes to inspire. It’s a “really fantastic” time for space exploration, Ouellette said. From the stunning early images produced by the powerful new telescope to the early success of the Artemis moon mission, the world’s fascination with space is going into overdrive. And Canada is playing no small part in some of the key projects that have aspiring scientists looking starry eyed again in 2022, with major milestones yet to come. But even as Canadian space experts wax poetic about the current landscape, they wait to see whether the influx of federal investment will continue despite domestic economic pressures. For the team behind the James Webb telescope — named after the NASA administrator who led the Apollo program — it’s been a “very, very busy year,” Ouellette said. The telescope, which sent its first dazzling images back to Earth in July, includes two Canadian components, and Canadian researchers are among those involved in analyzing its findings. “Within just a few hours of data collection it had already blown previous missions out of the water,” Ouellette said. He noted that a University of Toronto team discovered some of the oldest globular clusters, or groups of millions of stars held together by gravity. And sometime in the early months of 2023, researchers at the University of Montreal are expected to deliver the first analysis of the TRAPPIST-1 system, home to seven Earth-like planets. NASA’s Artemis mission, which is planning the first human exploration of the moon since the 1960s, also hit major milestones this year. The Artemis I flight, which saw the Orion spacecraft slip into a temporary lunar orbit, returned to Earth on Sunday after a successful November 16 launch. Next year, the Canadian Space Agency will announce which Canadian astronaut will join the crew of Artemis II, which is expected to launch in 2024. The move will make Canada the second country in the world to have a human go into deep space — or the region of space beyond the dark side of our Moon — said Gordon Osinski, a professor at Western University in London. Ont. “I still don’t know how Canada did it,” he said, calling it an “incredible coup” to be a Canadian astronaut. “Some of the images from Artemis just blew me away,” he said. “As someone who wasn’t alive during Apollo, seeing these images in real time is amazing. And so I think it’s going to be very inspiring, this mission.” Canadarm3, the successor to two previous Canadian-made robotic arms, is expected to be released in 2027, and its design by Canadian company MDA is already underway. It is expected to dock at the Artemis mission’s lunar portal, an outpost orbiting the moon. Meanwhile, Osinski has been named the principal investigator for Canada’s first rover mission, which is expected to land on the Moon’s south pole as early as 2026. Design of the rover by Canadensys Aerospace Corporation will begin in earnest next year. he said. “People have been talking about this for a long time,” Osinski said. “For the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve been doing study after study. We’ve been paid to think about doing it and develop ideas about it. But we’re actually doing it, which is really amazing.” Canadian Space Agency President Lisa Campbell said this was “a really exciting time” for the national space program. “It’s like a dream factory and an innovation engine,” he said. Campbell cited a myriad of ways Canada is involved in international projects in the public and private sectors focused on exploring the Moon and beyond. But he also stressed that Canada’s efforts in space are not just about exploring its outer rays, but also have applications at home. Natural Resources Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada pledged $169 million in this year’s federal budget to deliver and operate a new wildfire monitoring satellite, which is expected to launch in 2028. Canada is also part of an atmospheric observing project with NASA that will collect data to predict extreme weather events on Earth. And in 2022, the agency launched a deep space healthcare challenge, a competition to develop diagnostic and detection technologies that can be used both on manned deep space missions and in remote communities in Canada. “The challenges of space push us to innovate the things we need here on Earth,” Campbell said. Many moon-related projects, including rover missions, have received funding from the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program, a five-year, $150 million fund that scientists like Osinski hope will be renewed. “I would hate for us to have all these missions to the moon in the next two, three years and that’s it, and then we’re back to square one,” Osinski said. “CSA needs to convince the government that this is a worthwhile endeavour.” While Campbell said the program was “very popular,” she would not say whether the federal government has committed to funding another term. “Additional investment is always welcome,” he said. The federal Liberals’ space strategy, released in 2019, committed Canada to remaining a space nation and recognized “the importance of space as a strategic national asset.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published on December 11, 2022. Marie-Danielle Smith, The Canadian Press
