University of Calgary sensors looked at for military application

The instruments are deployed across Canada into the North and Arctic regions. They measure a region, the low altitude, near-Earth space environment that is of particular interest for radio frequency propagation for signals such as radar signals from Canada's modernized defense systems that are being developed and deployed in our Arctic regions. Those high frequency signals are transmitted from the radar. They are sky waves that reflect from the ionosphere above the Earth's surface and then reflect from the Earth's surface and in doing so they travel around the Earth. That allows those systems to detect and resolve targets or objects and can illuminate them at very large distances. So it gives early warning for anything that may be approaching Canada's airspace. They also sense information about the space environment itself in terms of absorption effects, in terms of volatile dynamic space weather activity such as the aurora and other polar effects that can have adverse impact on other types of space-based systems such as our navigation systems such as GPS which many people are familiar with or low-Earth orbiting, new systems such as the Starlink type of constellations that are delivering communications and connectivity internet in remote regions where there's limited ground infrastructure again such as in Canada's north. Through the same instrument you're getting measurements, direct measurements of impact on terrestrial communications as well as measuring the space environment. So then now you can connect those two and then along comes Susan Scone who's got the most advanced tomographic inversion model for this environment and we start to collaborate and she's expanding her model to use this data and all of a sudden it becomes applicable to defensive applications that are in this HF domain. So then we started working with DND and DRDC to develop that capacity and some of these operational systems that now will use the model and the real-time data and then boom now we've got a system that's supporting two distinct classes of users. The data is all publicly available, the science data is all publicly available for the scientific community and then there's these layered on top applications that are targeted for dual-use applications.