Tiny technology

NASA officials said today they are ready to launch a trio of tiny satellites from a plane-dropped Pegasus rocket out of California on Feb. 28. The $130 million Space Technology 5 mission is designed to demonstrate miniaturized technology that could be used in future constellations of small satellites. An important application of these would be the study of space weather - the effects of solar storms on satellites used for everything from communication to navigation.

"They're growing every year, and because they're at very high altitudes, they often take the brunt of the space weather," Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Jim Slavin said of the satellites on which our world now relies. Constellations of dozens of microsatellites could be used for scientific study and, further in the future, as an alert system that would flag disruptive space weather.