GEORGE DILLER: This is Pegasus Launch Control at T-25 minutes, 5 seconds and counting. With us now in the Mission Director's
Center is our project manager from the Goddard Spaceflight Center for ST5, Jim Slavin. Dr. Slavin, welcome, and I guess this is a
moment of anticipation for you, because once the spacecraft has separated, why, you're, what you've been working for some time for
is off and under way. And we'd like you to tell us something about that now. We've got some animation that will walk us through the
launch sequence with the Pegasus and then run into the science. So, if we could roll that tape, Dr. Slavin, if you'll explain about ST5.
DR. JIM SLAVIN: OK. You're looking at the initial drop that starts ST5 on its way into orbit. The total duration all the way through
to deployment of the last spacecraft is only 16 minutes. Each of these three stages burn for two or three minutes. So it's actually quite
quick. That was the fairing coming off. As soon as they clear the atmosphere, you no longer need the fairing to protect your payload.
There we go, we've got the top stage now. So this is the last. And we should be in our initial orbit. And they're doing these rotations.
These rotations are to keep the sun from shining just on one side of the payload, and maybe making the metal on that side expand to
the point where something might bind. So we've got two of the three spacecraft out of the way. Another thermal roll, keep the
temperature nice and even. There goes out the third one. Now the appendage that you see coming off of the spacecraft, that's the
magnetometer boom. These spacecraft, no matter how clean that you make them, they still perturb the local magnetic field a little bit.
So you like to have your magnetic field sensor as remote as you can from the body of the spacecraft. Now there's the sun, that's the
source of all the space weather systems that permeate the solar system. It just, it just underwent a coronal mass ejection, and that's why
you see all of that ionized gas streaming off of the sun. Now those lines, those lines of force you see emanating from the Earth, that's
the Earth's magnetic field, and it gets kind of stirred by this interaction with the coronal mass ejection. And you saw the, you saw the
magnetic field lines basically being, we would say eroded and pulled back into the tail, and so you get this, this intense circulation.
And as a result of that, you wind up with, you could say secondary space weather systems being spawned, actually within the geomagnetic
field. One of them produces the auroras, and that's actually what ST5 is going to be investigating, exactly how the magnetosphere
drives those auroral lights. What you're looking at right here is one of the modern numerical simulations, or computer models of the
magnetosphere. Those clouds, those colored regions upstream, that was actually the bow-shock. That gas comes off of the sun so fast that you
actually, the Earth actually has a sonic boom, if you like, that forms all the way around it. And that's what they were trying to
represent there. DILLER: Tell us a little about the so-called "lights-out" part, where the spacecraft's kind of on their own. How does
that work? SLAVIN: Well, that's actually one of the more exciting aspects of the mission, from a technical standpoint. You'd like to,
ideally we'd like to have these little spacecraft be as autonomous as possible. In fact, some people, some engineers actually believe
that one day we're going to be able to design these little spacecraft so that they're smart enough that they may never need intervention
from the ground. But we're not there yet. So, at the level of technology we're at right now, we hope to leave the little spacecraft on
their own for periods of time at least up to one week. We may even go a little bit beyond that. It's basically a measure of the ability of
the spacecraft to diagnose and correct anything that might go wrong or anything that the environment might do to them.
DILLER: Now, are these, is this happening with autonomous commands on the spacecraft, or is the ground station computers, are they
doing this on their own, or is it some combination? SLAVIN: It's a bit of a combination. The spacecraft can only store so much data.
So the entire time that the lights are out, which just means there's no human present, there's no human supervision, the spacecraft are
going to be identifying science events. Whenever they do identify a science event, they are going to be storing the data. And that data
has to come down, and the ground system is going to, again, autonomously decide that it's time that some of these spacecraft need to
be milked, so to speak. And that data needs to be taken down in order to make room for, to collect data for more events.
DILLER: Well, Jim, thank you very much. And I think you're, you're about to have a very exciting three months and most of this will
be going on at Goddard, I gather. Is that correct? Goddard Spaceflight Center? SLAVIN: Yes, Goddard Spaceflight Center is the lead
for this aspect of the mission and you're absolutely right, it's going to be really exciting. DILLER: Jim, thanks very much. At 19
minutes, 50 seconds now, before the launch of Pegasus and ST5, this is Pegasus Launch Control.