A University of Alberta team is set launch a satellite of their own design, meant to help officials on the ground keep an eye on wildfire conditions and monitor wildfires.

The Canadian Space Agency has awarded a satellite launch and a $250,000 grant to the University of Alberta.

For the U of A group, their satellite (dubbed Ex-Alta 2) has three mission objectives: one of those will be to monitor ground conditions in Alberta, to predict where wildfires could break out, and to monitor fires.

“That has great potential to stop huge disasters, like the ones we’ve seen in the last few years,” project manager Callie Lissina said.

According to one of the team’s leaders, the inspiration for one of those objectives was personal to many members of the group.

“The Fort McMurray forest fires have impacted some of the students here in the group,” U of A professor Duncan Elliot said. “There’s a passionate reason to do something.”

“I had some friends who were displaced because of the Fort McMurray fires, some of my friends from engineering,” Erik Halliwell, an engineering physics student, said. “A bit of a personal connection, so that our wildfire imager can maybe help those like them who wouldn’t have to be displaced because of natural disasters like that.”

Lissina said the satellite will give crews a unique view of a wildfire.

“They can decide where to allocate their firefighting resources based on the risk zones that we’ve identified from space,” Lissina said.

Ex-Alta 2 is one of fifteen cube satellite projects that received funding Friday from the Canadian Space Agency.

The U of A team will work with teams from Yukon College in Whitehorse and Aurora College in Inuvik, NWT – the collaboration has been called Northern SPIRIT (Northern Space Program for Innovative Research and Integrated Training).

Ex-Alta 2’s mission will also measure solar activity that could harm communications infrastructure; and to make open-source hardware and software available to other teams, making space exploration more accessible.

All of that technology will fit into a satellite about the size of a loaf of bread.

“I’m very proud of this team, this team has tremendous stamina and creativity, it’s the kind of interdisciplinary work that’s hard to create in the classroom,” Elliot said.

The same U of A team launched its first satellite, called Ex-Alta 1, one year ago. That satellite monitors space weather.

With files from Erin Isfeld