A few Toronto students have set their sights high, high in the sky. Four students from Humber College have successfully built a device capable of contacting the International Space Station.
The project, called Operation First Contact, pairs a simple-looking antenna with a complex communications device.
The effort is the work of 34-year-old Toronto natives Gino Cunti and Paul Je, and Kevin Luong of Mississauga and Patrick Neelin of Welland, Ontario, both in their twenties.
The wireless and telecommunication program majors are in the process of finishing two communications systems built to NASA’s specification.
The team will make contact with the station after receiving approval from Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS), the organization acting as a middleman between the students and the space agency.
“What makes this project unique is that we’re just four college students” Neelin said. Contacts with the station are routinely made through the ARISS program using a ham radio. Very few professional radio engineers and graduate-level university engineering students have successfully built a device to contact the space station.
Neelin admitted that the road wasn’t always smooth.
“A year ago, it seemed like an almost impossible feat. We were a year into school, and we didn’t really have an in-depth knowledge of what we were doing. To say we’re going to build two radio stations to contact space…it just felt almost impossible.”
After plenty of hard work and research, the project has paid off. But the first thing to pay off is the cost of the venture—so far stacking up to $3000.
“We’ve been fortunate enough to have funding from different parts of the school,” said Neelin. Humber College president John Davies, the Humber Student Federation, and the Humber School of Applied Technology, amongst others, have supported the project.
There’s huge room for error; the students will have to make contact within a 10-minute margin with a station that is travelling at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour and a distance of 440 kilometres from Earth.
A date with NASA has yet to be confirmed, but the students hope to make contact before graduation on May 1.
Beginning in January, Humber students will get a chance to enter a contest and submit a question to NASA astronauts. The four-member team will pick the best question, which will be asked when the point of contact is made.
As graduation approaches, the students are looking ahead. Cunti has plans in the satellite installation business and hopes to continue in the radio communications field. Je and Luong plan to venture into the wireless field, while Neelin wants to pursue a career in radio and television broadcasting.
Whatever their plans for the future, if Operation First Contact is a success, these four can say their project was truly out of this world.
