Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) on the Communication/Navigation Outage
Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite consists of one central electronics box that
receives inputs from three orthogonal 20m tip-to-tip electric field double probe antennas,
a fixed-bias Langmuir probe, a fluxgate magnetometer, and an optical lightning detector.
All of the instruments were designed, built, and tested at the Goddard Space Flight Center
with the exception of the lightning detector that was designed at the Univ. of Washington,
and fabricated and tested at Goddard. The VEFI instrument is thus one experiment with many
sensors to measure the AC and DC electric fields related to plasma shift and irregularity
development in the ionosphere.