NAIL: Dr. Slavin joins us in the studio now. Welcome to the webcast, Dr. Slavin.
SLAVIN: Thank you. Glad to be here.
NAIL: ST5 is attempting to use a team of small satellites to conduct the sort of science usually performed by one large spacecraft.
How is this approach valuable for space-based research?
SLAVIN: That's an excellent question.
One of the most rapidly expanding areas of space-based research just now is actually the study of space weather.
Space weather is the study of how the entire solar system responds to very intense and dynamic solar outbursts,
in particular solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
These type of, types of large -- you can think of them as explosions on the sun -- basically fill the solar system with very energetic charged-particle radiation,
and they also pack a lot of energy. Eventually, this energy finds its way to the planets and even down to the outer layers of the planetary atmospheres.
Now, just as it's the case at the Earth, when we're trying to study tropospheric weather,
be it hurricanes or thunderstorms, you need measurements from a lot of different locations simultaneously
if you're going to actually be able to see how the
weather fronts develop and tell exactly where they're going to go,
so that you can warn somebody that they're going to have this type of condition on one day or that type of condition on another day.
Being able to make simultaneous measurements with perhaps as many as
100 of these micro-satellites is an important first step for progress in forecasting space weather.