Technology Science - Canadian space technology inventor honoured

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Henry Buijs received the award from Steve MacLean, president of the Canadian Space Agency, at a ceremony in Ottawa Thursday night. Henry Buijs received the award from Steve MacLean, president of the Canadian Space Agency, at a ceremony in Ottawa Thursday night. (Canadian Space Agency)

A Quebec scientist who developed the technology to monitor the Earth's ozone layer as well as greenhouse gases from space has been honoured by the Canadian Space Agency.

Henry Buijs was given the John Chapman Award of Excellence for lifetime achievement in space science and technology, the agency announced Friday.

"It was quite an honour," said Buijs, 72, who never imagined that one of his inventions would become a key piece of Canadian space technology.

Buijs is the co-founder of Quebec City-based Bomem, now a subsidiary of ABB group.

Bomem produced devices that monitor the Earth's atmosphere from orbiting satellites and the company is currently making a similar device to monitor the atmosphere of Mars from NASA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, to be launched in 2016.

That is a key part of instruments called Fourier transform infrared spectrometers.

Many other companies make such instruments, which gather information about the atmosphere by measuring the colours of infrared light that is absorbed by different molecules.

"Where we stood out is we made them much more rugged and stable," Buijs said. That was thanks to a feature invented by Buijs called dynamic alignment, originally intended to help the instruments survive in an industrial setting.

The technology first blasted off into space aboard the Canadian ozone-monitoring SciSat-1 satellite in 2003.

Peter Bernath, mission scientist for SciSat-1, said that Bomem had been dabbling in space and made "excellent products."

"So when we needed that kind of instrument to look at ozone, this was kind of a natural fit," he said.

At the time, Bomem didn't have much experience with space technology, but neither did companies in other countries, Bernath said.

"The engineering is very tricky," he added, noting that instruments aboard satellites in space can't be repaired.

The instrument aboard Scisat-1 is still collecting data and performed so well that Japan's greenhouse-gas monitoring GOSAT mission ended up buying one also.

The Canadian Space Agency announced last August that it had contracted ABB to build a similar device for the upcoming Mars mission.

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