After two years of holding a joint space mining conference in partnership with the Space Resources Roundtable (SRR), organizer Dale Boucher from the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT) says space and terrestrial mining are becoming more “joined at the hip” and as such, it’s becoming more feasible to do such work in space.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) took its first foray into deeper provincial educational partnerships when it signed a memorandum of understanding with Nova Scotia education officials, a CSA representative says. While the agency currently has lesson plans and other educational items geared to curricula in provinces across the country, the CSA is targeting deeper involvement with certain areas.

Legal and military headaches are standing in the way of data-sharing for GPS, remote sensing and other types of Canadian-used space assets, according to several speakers at the Canadian Space Summit on Sunday.

Northern communities will benefit from Canada’s research into plant-based, closed life support systems that are being developed for space, according to Alan Scott, Research and Development Coordinator at COM DEV.

As Canadians bump up their involvement in space-based earth observation, one of the pressing problems looming is how to deorbit those satellites once their missions are completed. This was one of the themes of the Earth Observation track at this past weekends Canadian Space Summit.

With more than a half-dozen posters available for delegates to view, Gordon Zhou – a young researcher at the University of British Columbia’s department of civil engineering – said in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is the one theme that unites the posters he wrote with Austin Mardon, at the Antarctic Institute of Canada.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has spent the past three years putting “considerable emphasis” on lunar exploration technologies, according to the paper Advanced technology Development for Space Exploration at the Canadian Space Agency being presented at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group this week.

The concept of mining on the moon is “embryonic”, notes Dale Boucher, a researcher from the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT), but with the right economic argument there will be companies interested in getting involved. Boucher co-authored the paper Assessing the Resource Potential of the Moon: The Case for a Decadal-Scale Robotic Lunar Exploration Program presented at this weeks Lunar Exploration Analysis Group meeting.

The main success of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) is allowing Canada to keep an eye out on what other countries are doing and to develop programs in parallel, according to the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) Victoria Hipkin. The program scientist for planetary exploration is a co-author on a paper explaining ISECG’s importance; it will be presented at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group …