A company from Chalk River welcomed members from the Canadian Space Agency and Russian research partners to the Ottawa Valley this week. On Monday, February 24th, Bubble Technology Industries (BTI), marked 10-years of successful operation of their “space mini-reader” that’s been used on the International Space Station. The original mini-reader was developed by Canadian and Russian research partners and designed and built by BTI in Chalk River. BTI Vice-President, Lianne Ing, says the bubble detector is used to measure radiation and help assess the risk to astronauts.
Ing says partners from the Canadian Space Agency and the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems returned the bubble detector after 10-years of operation in space and found that it still worked.
Ing says their Russian partners will take back a new set of BTI bubble detectors for use in space. She adds the bubble detectors are mainly deployed in space and the local company is currently working on radiation technology to be used on the moon or for deep space missions to Mars.
(Photo from the left: Andrea Norris, Senior Project Manager, BTI – Bruce Nicayenzi, Payload Engineer, CSA – Dr. Harry Ing, President, BTI – Leena Tomi, Radiation Health Project Manager for Operational Space Medicine, CSA – Dr. Eric Johnston, Research Scientist, BTI – Dr. Martin Smith, Manager of Research & Development, BTI – Vyacheslav Shurshakov, Head of the Department for Radiation Safety of Manned Space Missions, Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) at the Russian Academy of Sciences – Olga Ivanova, IBMP – Vasily Savinkov, Roscosmos State Space Corporation – Lianne Ing, Vice President, BTI)