Wraparound James Webb Space Telescope images and a painted hatch frame the entranceway of a new mission control based at Western University.
As shown to SpaceQ on video, the seventh floor of the Western Interdisciplinary Research Building now has a refurbished room complete with ground station. Walk inside, and you will see a long meeting room filled with a conference table that can break out into individual desks, high-definition screens, and a set of cubicles at the back for operations or research.
Large picture windows look out on the campus and far behind, downtown London. That’s visible from the entrance area, which hosts couches, a bookshelf with space books, and an Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket Lego set.
The bright and scientific, yet bookish aesthetic is meant to attract multidisciplinary conversations from a diverse set of students, said Sarah Gallagher, physics and astronomy professor and director of Western Space.
“We want to have places that are really going to facilitate that,” Gallagher told SpaceQ. “We want people to sit down together, and hammer out hard problems. It’s really important that you have a space that facilitates that collaboration.”
The immediate opportunity for this mission control will be twofold. The first is operating a new cubesat to track migratory birds, called Western Skylark, which is expected to launch around June 2026. That cubesat will be directly controlled using a three-meter dish on the roof of the building; capabilities are already available using amateur radio frequencies as well as S-band.
Licencing with the federal government should be complete by the time Skylark launches, allowing Western to operate independently of NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and other space agencies.
In the meantime, the facilities will be used in a few months for planning observations with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (MRO-HiRISE), a famous imager at the Red Planet that tracks landslides, dust storms, craters and other signs of change on the surface.
Aside from these, Gallagher said Western is in contact with several companies considering using the facilities for low Earth orbit LEO missions using the dish, for analog missions using video links, or for planning missions further afield using the expertise Western has on site. In the future, Western is hoping to add an optical link for faster-speed communication with LEO satellites.
Western’s mission control, Gallagher said, appears from their studies to be the most advanced of a university in the country. And it has complementary capabilities to companies that operate their own mission controls, as it may offer more planning space, or a backup facility in case a primary mission control is unavailable.
Partnerships with companies may open up new revenue streams, as well as new funding opportunities with university and private partnerships, she added. And the mission control can also be used for community projects – such as an ongoing methane monitoring project with the City of London important to climate change understanding.
Funding for the new facility came from $750,000 provided by Western’s strategic priorities fund. AV equipment came from the faculty of science, including a 360-degree meeting camera. Research security requirements were facilitated by Western’s constable service, while the space was provided by Western’s office of the vice-president (research).
