NASA’s latest small satellite mission is now in orbit studying how natural and human-made radio waves travel from Earth’s surface into space, helping scientists better understand and predict changes in the near‑Earth space environment.
The Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space (CANVAS) mission launched April 7 aboard a Minotaur IV rocket from Space Launch Complex 8 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as part of the U.S. Department of War’s Space Test Program S29A (STP-S29A) mission.
NASA secured CANVAS a ride through the agency’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI). The CANVAS CubeSat is a small satellite designed to measure very low frequency radio waves (VLF) in low Earth orbit produced by lightning and ground-based transmitters. Its job is to measure how much of that ground-generated energy makes it through the ionosphere — the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere filled with electrically charged particles — and into the magnetosphere. By quantifying the VLF energy that penetrates upward, CANVAS provides a critical link between what scientists observe on the ground and what they can measure in space.
Very low frequency waves in the Earth’s magnetosphere can “nudge” the trajectory of trapped high-energy electrons, sometimes causing them to spill out of the radiation belts and into the a …