After years of tinkering, a team of university students from Winnipeg were selected by the Canadian Space Agency to send up a satellite into orbit.

Fifteen teams from across Canada were awarded between $200,000 to $250,000 to design and build their satellites by the space agency Friday.

The teams will launch "cubesats" into space — small square satellites that can carry whatever sensors, cameras or computers researchers manage to squeeze inside.

Each cube is small enough to fit in an adult hand but they can be assembled together like Lego blocks to accommodate bigger projects.

One of the cubesat working models the Winnipeg team is using to build their satellite. This model is not as big as the final product — cubesats measure 10 centimetres high by 10 centimetres wide. (Tyson Koschik/CBC)

Canadian astronaut Jenni Sidey said the projects essentially give researchers the ability to conduct their own space mission. She hopes the thrill will inspire greater interest in the final frontier.

"We want to encourage people to be interested in space and to enter the space profession," she said. "By reaching out to people who are engineers and scientists in university we're really kind of igniting that spark early."

'Space is pretty hard'

Impetus for the Winnipeg team's satellite project started while a group of engineering students were still in undergrad, designing satellites "for fun," says Matt Driedger, an engineering doctoral student at the University of Manitoba.

When he and the other members of the University of Manitoba Space Applications and Technology Society start working on the space-ready satellite this summer it will be their fifth attempt at building a satellite.

"Space is pretty hard," he said. "The biggest criteria for joining the team is just liking space."

One of the biggest challenges for the team is fitting in all the components they need, like batteries and computer chips, into the cubesat — which come in standard-sized blocks. The team uses 3D plastic models to ensure everything, including the bolts and screws, can fit.

Their mission will be sending up rocks and minerals, including moon rocks and small meteorites, to see how the substances change in space.

The data should give scientists a better sense of where space rocks come from and how old they are, said Philip Ferguson, the project lead and engineering professor at the University of Manitoba.

Researchers already know a lot about how synthetic materials age in space because humans have sent up so many satellites over the years. Natural materials are still a bit of a mystery.

"We don't often look at how rocks and minerals change over time [in space] and that's really what we're going to learn by doing this experiment," said Ferguson.

The researchers will be looking at how things like space radiation, atomic oxygen and micro-meteorites affect the materials.

Grade 8 students Eve Lawrence, left, and Kailynne Ogilvie helped design a sundial-like competent for the Winnipeg team's satellite to measure sunlight. (Tyson Koschik/CBC)

While much of the work will be done by Winnipeg university students in their spare time, the Winnipeg team includes a contribution from Grade 8 students at Stonewall Centennial School.

The students designed a mechanism to measure sunlight that works similar to a sundial. Kailynne Ogilvie, 13, said she ran around her school gym with excitement when she found she would help with a project destined for space.

"It's exciting and nerve-racking because you don't know if you're getting the math wrong," she said.

The Winnipeg team's satellite is expected to go up into space on a supply mission to the International Space Station in two to three years, Driedger said.

After that, it will last in space for about a year, sending data back down to Earth, before falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere.