University of Manitoba

Published purpose

With Canada's Arctic regions experiencing the effects of climate change faster than the rest of the country, northern Inuit and Indigenous communities require assistance. Traditional travel and hunting routes are being disrupted by unsafe ice conditions as multi-year ice melts, creating a need for community-driven remote sensing. To help address this need, an interdisciplinary team of Arctic climate change scientists, remote sensing specialists, and space systems engineers are proposing the ArcticSat Mission: A community co-developed 3U CubeSat equipped with a high-frequency microwave radiometer capable of detecting ice/water interfaces from a polar orbit and operated by community members from Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut and Churchill, Manitoba. Equipped with timely data on ice and snow conditions (including ponds of fresh water during the melt season), communities will be able to assess safe travel corridors and monitor how the surrounding environment is changing on a weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual basis -- and how it may change in the future. Most importantly, ArcticSat will be designed, built, and operated in cooperation with northern community members, sharing the data freely over the SIKU Indigenous Knowledge Social Network, making it one of the most accessible sources of space data for northern Canadian communities.