Day 11 - June 26th

By Pieter van Vugt,

Another early morning for the study tour group. Breakfast was on time today and at 8:15 we were ready to leave for the David Florida Lab of the Canadian Space Agency.

Upon arriving there we all got V.I.P tags and we were lead to a large conference room, where we enjoyed two presentations. One on the lab itself, and one on the Combined Data acquisition and Control System for their largest vacuum chamber that is designed for testing satellites.

Then after a short coffee brake we got a guided tour of the facilities. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures anywhere on the premises, but there was a photographer from the CSA who took a group picture of us standing in front of the RADARSAT II satellite.

That's right, we got to see the real thing, that's going to go into orbit coming October!

We also got to see the container in which the satellite will be shipped to the launch site, and various vacuum chambers that are used for simulating space and testing satellites in. The largest of these chambers is a cylinder of 7 meter across and 10 meter high. It is the size of the space shuttle bay. Not that anything that's ever been inside there was ever launched by Space shuttle; too expensive. They also showed us shaker tables that can simulate launch conditions. And we saw by far the largest anechoic RF chamber we'd seen on this trip so far.

After a lunch in the CSA cafeteria, we got into our vans to drive to Montreal, 220km. And just when we tuned into the hotel parking lot we had a little 'fender-bender' accident. Some other car overtook us just when we were turning left to enter the lot. We got some paint scratches, and the other car a small dent. Otherwise, no one was hurt. The other driver didn't speak English, and it was quite a bit of a hassle to fill out all the paper work, and we had to call the car rental company to get all the information we needed. We checked into our hotel, and went out for diner individually. The rest of the evening was free time.