Cane earned her Ph.D. in radio astronomy from the University of Tasmania in 1978. In 1979, following her Ph.D., she joined the National Aeronautics and Space Agency 's Goddard Space Flight center to work on the International Cometary Explorer. The data from her work provided evidence for a new class of radio bursts called SA events, which defined the characteristics of radio emission from interplanetary shocks. Following this, in 1984, Dr. Cane continued to work with solar and galactic particle observations from Interplanetary Monitoring Platform-8 (IMP 8). In the years following, Cane and her husband William Erickson split their time between Maryland and Bruny Island, Tasmania, where Cane continued to work at the Goddard Space Flight Center.