NASA Thursday announced its latest New Millennium mission: the Nanosat Constellation Trailblazer. It will launch three satellites designed to test new techniques of protecting microelectronics from radiation, programming autonomous decision-making capabilities, and using miniature communications components. The satellites will also experiment with new lithium ion batteries, and more efficient propulsion systems.

Slated for launch in 2003, the trailblazer satellites are being designed to operate in concert, said Dana Brewer, the New Millennium Program Executive.

"The most important thing is that not the individual technologies, but that we're going to operate them as a system in a small spacecraft," Brewer said. "The integration and operating as a system will allow us to do new things that we haven't done before."

Such new things will be necessary when NASA launches its Magnetospheric Constellation Project -- a science mission that aims to put 100 microsatellites in orbit around Earth to observe the Sun and the affects solar events have on Earth's magnetic field.

The Constellation Trailblazer mission is preparing the way for this network of 22-pound (10 kilogram) satellites which is being planned for launch in 2010. Those 100 small orbiters will be launched as a single payload, and then deployed like flinging frisbees upon reaching orbit. NASA aims to build these satellites at a cost of $1 million each.

"To do this within cost we have to have autonomous spacecraft. We can't have one operator on the ground for each spacecraft," Brewer said. An autonomously-controlled constellation of satellites would be able to communicate with all its components, and react to various changes. For example, the satellites would be able to reposition themselves if one or several satellites dropped out, Brewer said. They would also be able to react to changes in the space environment. Some of the most important targets of the Magnetospheric Constellation will be solar flares, giant explosions from the surface of the sun that scientists call coronal mass ejections.

"The smarts that we want is to be able to have these satellites detect when one of these coronal mass ejections occur and then start taking a lot of data so that we can map how the magnetosphere responds to things that happen on the sun," Brewer said. The magnetosphere is the area occupied by Earth's magnetic field.

Budgeted to cost almost 27 million, the Nanosat Constellation Trailblazer is the fifth of the New Millenium missions. Other New Millennium projects currently in space are Deep Space 1, which passed by Asteroid Braille in July and Deep Space 2, which launched a probe to Mars in early January.