C/NOFS Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI)

The 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.

位于通信/导航故障预报系统（C/NOFS）卫星上的矢量电场仪器（VEFI）由一个中央电子盒组成，该电子盒接收来自三个正交的、尖端间距为20米的电场双探针天线、一个固定偏置的朗缪尔探针、一个霍尔效应磁强计以及一个光电闪电探测器的输入。所有仪器均由戈达德太空飞行中心设计、制造和测试，除闪电探测器由华盛顿大学设计，在戈达德制造和测试外。因此，VEFI仪器是一个集众多传感器于一体的实验，用以测量与等离子体位移和电离层不规则性发展相关的交流电和直流电场。