WEBVTT

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NAIL: Dr. Slavin joins us in the studio now. Welcome to the webcast, Dr. Slavin.

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SLAVIN: Thank you. Glad to be here.

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NAIL: ST5 is attempting to use a team of small satellites to conduct the sort of science usually performed by one large spacecraft.

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How is this approach valuable for space-based research?

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SLAVIN: That's an excellent question.

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One of the most rapidly expanding areas of space-based research just now is actually the study of space weather.

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Space weather is the study of how the entire solar system responds to very intense and dynamic solar outbursts,

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in particular solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

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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,

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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.

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Now, just as it's the case at the Earth, when we're trying to study tropospheric weather,

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be it hurricanes or thunderstorms, you need measurements from a lot of different locations simultaneously

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if you're going to actually be able to see how the

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weather fronts develop and tell exactly where they're going to go,

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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.

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Being able to make simultaneous measurements with perhaps as many as

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100 of these micro-satellites is an important first step for progress in forecasting space weather.

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