The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) wants companies to develop three priority technologies: a small telescope for CubeSats, camera electronics for the proposed CASTOR space telescope and a radar module for a planned snow-monitoring satellite.
The agency posted the request for proposals (RFP), titled Enabling Technologies for Future Missions, on Oct. 15 under its Space Technology Development Program (STDP). It will award one contract per technology, worth up to $4 million in all.
Each contract aims to raise a technology’s readiness level (TRL), the nine-step scale used to rate how close a technology is to flight. The RFP sets a target TRL for each.
Priority technology Maximum funding Timeline Target TRL Lightweight athermal reflecting telescope for CubeSats $1 million 16 months 5 Readout electronics for large mosaic focal plane arrays (CASTOR) $1 million 24 months 4 Technologies for the Terrestrial Snow Mass Mission $2 million 12 months 4
The CSA listed four priority technologies in a draft it released in February as a request for information (RFI). The fourth, a $1.6-million spectrometer for the Atmospheric Data Continuity and Improvement (ADCI) initiative, is being sourced separately. In July, the CSA posted an advance contract award notice, which signals a plan to award a contract without competition unless another firm shows it can do the work. The notice identified Quebec City based ABB, which built the ACE-FTS spectrometer on Canada’s SCISAT satellite, and says the work “is fundamentally dependent on ABB’s ownership of the original design data.”
Technology 1: A mirror telescope small enough for CubeSats
Most CubeSats, the shoebox-sized satellites flown by universities and startups, still use lens telescopes, which limits how much detail they can see, the RFP says. The CSA wants a lightweight mirror telescope that stays in focus as temperatures swing in orbit. Mirrors fold the light path and pack a longer focal length into the same space.
Space agencies and other large organizations have flown mirror telescopes on CubeSats, but usually as one-off custom builds. The new design should adapt to satellites of different sizes.
The telescope must take up no more than two of the standard units a CubeSat is built from and pick out features smaller than seven metres on the ground. Earth observation is the main use, though astronomy and tracking objects in orbit are also possible.
Technology 2: Readout electronics for the CASTOR telescope’s detectors
The second contract would pay for readout electronics, the circuitry that powers an image sensor and pulls its data off, for Teledyne e2v’s CIS 301/302 detectors. No camera can run those sensors yet. They were chosen for CASTOR, the Canadian Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and UV Research, which would use four of them in each of its colour channels.
The RFP also names NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory as a target, saying a possible Canadian contribution to that mission is at a “preliminary definition stage at CSA.”
The Canadian Astronomical Society said in its September newsletter that the Coalition for Canadian Astronomy was “continuing its efforts to secure approval and funding of the CASTOR mission.” A plan for an 18- to 24-month study had been presented, the newsletter said. SpaceQ asked in January whether 2026 would be the year the telescope is approved.
Technology 3: A radar module for the Terrestrial Snow Mass Mission
The largest contract is for the Terrestrial Snow Mass Mission, which Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the CSA are developing to measure snow water equivalent, the amount of water stored in the snowpack, across the country. Seasonal snow is a key part of Canada’s water cycle, yet that measure is “inadequately monitored,” the RFP says.
The satellite would carry a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) working at two frequencies in the Ku band. SAR sees the ground through cloud and darkness. It would be the first Ku-band SAR mission of its type, so a lower-cost pathfinder satellite would fly ahead of it to test the hardware and the science. In 2024, the CSA asked scientists for ideas on how they would use such a radar. A study completed last year “demonstrated the feasibility of the mission,” the RFP says.
The contract covers the transmit-receive module, the electronics behind each antenna element that boost the outgoing radar pulse and amplify the returning echo. The pathfinder would need about 100 of them.
The RFP says a full design of how the module fits with the antenna and the rest of the radar would be “highly beneficial,” but the CSA left that work out “given the financial constraints of the RFP.”
Companies must submit their proposals by Nov. 26 at 2 p.m. ET.