Fraser Heights students headed to Italy after placing first in Canadian CanSat Design Challenge

From left to right, Fraser Heights Secondary students Vhea He, Jessica Tang, Timothy Cai, David Liu, Kentarou Howard (of Byrne Creek Secondary) and Brian Zhou are headed to Italy after winning the Canadian CanSat Design Challenge as Team Zephyr.

A team of students from Fraser Heights Secondary took the top spot at the Canadian CanSat Design Challenge in Lethbridge, Alta. last month, sending them to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) International CanSat Competition next month in Bologna, Italy.

Team Zephyr – made up of Timothy Cai, Vhea He, David Liu, Jessica Tang and Brian Zhou, and Byrne Creek Secondary student Kentarou Howard – ousted three other teams from across the country with their design of a CanSat, a pop can-sized model satellite fitted with electronics that is launched into or dropped from the sky and transmits data to earth. The team began developing their satellite in November and headed into the April competition with low expectations.

“We honestly didn’t know what to expect,” said Tang, who served as the team’s GPS technician. “It was all of our first times going into this competition – we just wanted to do it for the experience and for the learning opportunity. Winning wasn’t our primary focus.”

“The biggest issue leading up to the launch was our range,” said Team Zephyr leader Cai. “We were participating in the advanced category, and that requires us to transmit live data from the sky to our computer while the flight is happening, instead of recovering the CanSat afterwards and getting the data off the SD card.

“We were very worried about that because our antenna was not working super great. Surprisingly, we got the most data out of any team, it was something like 66 seconds out of 120 or so.”

Of the four teams, only the team from St. Thomas More Collegiate was able to recover their satellite, so Team Zephyr assumed the Burnaby independent school would take first place. When Team Zephyr was announced as the winner, “there was one-and-a-half seconds of dead silence, and then the entire team exploded. It was a shock,” said Cai.

“We all just couldn’t process it,” said Tang, explaining other factors that went into the judges’ decision. “There were two really long reports we had to submit before the launch, a pre-launch presentation as well as a post-launch presentation, plus the data we managed to retrieve.”

Now Team Zephyr will be going to the ESA International CanSat Competition to represent Canada on the world’s stage. From June 20-25, they will put their satellite up against about 25 other eligible countries at the contest in Bologna, Italy. The students will be travelling with their parents.

“We’re mostly just excited,” said He. “We have plans laid out for the next two months over what improvements we want to make, things we want to work on. That’s pretty exciting to look forward to.”

Congratulations to Team Zephyr on their Canadian CanSat Design Challenge win and best of luck at the European Space Agency’s International CanSat Competition!