Dr Priyanka Dhopade is a space sustainability researcher and firmly believes that sustainability should be integrated into projects from inception, at the design phase right through to launch and beyond.
With an academic background in aerospace engineering in Canada, Australia and at Oxford University, she is now a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Auckland.
In 2017, the Women's Engineering Society in the UK, named her as one of the top 50 Women in Engineering Under 35.
3 cube satellite Photo: "AFP PHOTO / NASA/HANDOUT"
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She tells Kathryn Ryan the space industry is growing exponentially.
“Just in New Zealand, in a report commissioned by MBIE in 2019, the estimated space sector in New Zealand is worth around $1.75 billion. It’s a really interesting trend around the world, that the space sector is increasingly more commercialised. It’s no longer just national space agencies, all sorts of private companies are cropping up all the time. It’s growing really quickly.”
Space junk has been well publicised and it’s no secret that the space industry is carbon intensive and requires much fuel to be burned.
“There’s this very real urgency for climate change and how we respond to it. Particularly in New Zealand, we have all these commitments to becoming carbon-neutral and there’s a growing need to look beyond just economic value as a measure of success.
“When we design new products or technology, we need to prioritise the kind of society we want to see here in New Zealand; one that is going to be sustainable and equitable and Te Tiriti led. At the moment, there is currently no public data on how sustainable these technologies actually are in the long-term and there’s no way at doing a trade off for the environmental cost and societal benefit for these technologies. What we really need are better decision making tools that are evidence based.”
She says that we need to come to terms with what we’re doing here on Earth before we begin thinking about space and other planets.
“What I and my team of environmental engineers at the University of Auckland are trying to do is understand the environmental impact of a given space technology over its entire lifecycle.”
They start at the very beginning, for instance looking at a satellite involves looking at the mining that goes into the aluminium used in it, all the way to the end of its life which is usually the satellite de-orbiting and burning up into Earth’s atmosphere.
“We can do this for an entire space mission by breaking it down into all its segments like design, manufacturing, launch, operation, disposal, et cetera and then adding up the environmental impact.
“What we’re really trying to design is some sort of data infrastructure, understanding what data needs to be collected in what form and where companies, who would be the end users, could look for it internally and really establishing a set of guidelines to do these lifecycle assessments.”
She says lifecycle assessments are hard to do retrospectively and being in New Zealand, with its burgeoning sector, helps them get in on the ground.
“We want to try and engage with industry now and be proactive about sustainable design practices a lifecycle assessments so that it has a much better impact going forward.
“We really have a unique, potentially world-leading opportunity here in New Zealand because no other space sector is really at this stage thinking about these things from the very beginning.”
Dhopade says when we first started launching satellites, not much thought was given to the consequences of what we were doing and space junk has turned into a rather big issue.
“What I’m trying to do with my research is say, no let’s be proactive and think about the consequences based on what we want to see in the future, what kind of space sector do we want and it has to be a sustainable one.”