LATITUDE
SATELLITE MISSION LAUNCHES U OF A GRAD INTO SPACE CAREER Space really is big in our members’ lives, these days, as any regular reader of Movers & Shakers surely knows. Here’s a follow up of sorts to an M&S item we ran in the summer. Tyler Hrynyk , a former university student member of APEGA, is still aiming for the stars. Fresh off sending a satellite into space with the rest of his University of Alberta AlbertaSat team (aforementioned summer item), he has been handpicked to join one of the world’s leading companies in the small satellite market, Innovative Solutions in Space. Mr. Hrynyk joined the AlbertaSat team during his first year of engineering, becoming the student responsible for controlling and communicating with Ex-Alta 1, the cube satellite the team designed, built, and sent into orbit last April. “I joined the AlbertaSat team because I thought it would be a cool, fun distraction,” says Mr. Hrynyk in an interview with the U of A’s folio magazine. “Little did I know I would become one of the project managers and that I’d be flying the spacecraft. It changed the course of my career.” He and the other Ex-Alta 1 team also made some history. Their project was Alberta’s first space deployment. Ex-Alta 1 was one of 50 cube satellites built by students around the world, and it has been making the team proud. Designed to study extreme space weather, in the last year the satellite has captured a massive solar flare from the surface of the sun—one of the
OUT OF THIS WORLD -photo by Jason Franson Recent U of A graduate Tyler Hrynyk—a student member of APEGA when he attended uni- versity—has been invited to join Innovative Solutions in Space, a Netherlands-based startup focused on sending satellites into orbit.
most powerful flares in more than a decade—and overcome a number of technical difficulties that required software updates and reboots to keep it alive. The Netherlands city of Delft is home to Innovative Solutions, which manufactured Ex-Alta 1’s metal frame and liked what they saw in Mr. Hrynyk. The company, founded in 2006, has grown to more than 80 employees, all of whom are skilled in space technology and engineering. The company created the job specifically for Mr. Hrynyk, who says his experience with the AlbertaSat team and its members really paved the way for the current opportunity. “I owe this to everyone else I worked with. Everybody on the team owes something to everybody else,” he says. “This project was very hands-on and getting this job would not have been possible without the students I was working with, who
built the satellite and the ground station. Collin Cupido and Charles Nokes [an APEGA E.I.T.] did the majority of work building Ex-Alta 1 in the clean room. If they had made even one mistake and the satellite didn’t work, I would never have been able to fly the satellite and get this job. It’s very much a community- based thing.” Also a point of pride: AlbertaSat is helping the university get noticed on the space engineering, science, and technology stage. “A few years ago, we set out our vision for AlbertaSat, and one [part] was to make Alberta a leader in spacecraft engineering and science. We have absolutely accomplished that. We get emails every day from teams around the world asking us for advice because they know the success we have had. At the university level, in terms of building here in Alberta—we are becoming the hub in Western Canada.”
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