The University of Calgary's Institute for Space Research will lead the development of The Enhanced Polar Outflow Probe (e-POP), a scientific payload for the first made-in-Canada multi-purpose small satellite. This mission, called CASSIOPE, marks a new generation of smaller, cost-effective satellites.

CASSIOPE has both a scientific and a commercial objective: it will provide scientists with unprecedented details about potentially dangerous space weather - such as the solar storms that smacked the Earth's atmosphere earlier in the fall of 2003 - as well as demonstrate a new digital communications 'courier' service.

The e-POP payload will be carried by CASSIOPE. Once launched into orbit in late 2010, e-POP's eight scientific instruments will collect new data on space storms in the upper atmosphere and their potentially devastating impacts on radio communications, GPS navigation, and other space-based technologies. Space storms (also called solar storms because these disturbances originate from the Sun) generate huge electrical currents in the upper atmosphere's polar regions. The solar storms also produce the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights.

Co-funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) . The e-POP payload is devoted to the exploration of space weather phenomena in the transition region between the atmosphere and the magnetosphere.

This region of geospace is sandwiched between the atmosphere below 300 km, where the force of gravity on neutral particles dominates, and the magnetosphere above 3000 km, where electromagnetic forces on plasma (charged particles) rein supreme - in ways that have yet to be fully understood.

It is the main route of entry for solar particles and electromagnetic forces from outer space into the Earth atmosphere, and the route of escape for atmospheric particles, both charged and neutral, into outer space.

The e-POP project is a key project within the CSA's space science program and involves contributions from 10 Canadian universities and research organizations.