The Manakov system appears in the physics of optical fibers, as well as in quantum mechanics, as multi-component versions of the Nonlinear Schr\"odinger and the Gross-Pitaevskii equations.Although the Manakov system is completely integrable its solutions are far from being explicit in most cases. However, the Inverse Scattering Transform (IST) can be exploited to obtain asymptotic information about solutions.This thesis will describe the IST of the Manakov system, and its asymptotic behavior at short times. I will compare the focusing and defocusing behavior, numerically and analytically, for squared barrier initial potentials. Finally, I will show that the continuous spectrum gives the dominant contribution at short-times.