NASA Launches Three Satellites Into Orbit With Smart Phone Guts

 Space  

NASA recently launched three new nano-satellites into orbit. These “PhoneSats,” which were built using smartphone and off-the-shelf consumer components in a standard cubesat frame, may be the cheapest satellites ever launched.

Three smartphones destined to become low-cost satellites rode to space Sunday aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia.

The three PhoneSats are now operating in orbit, and may prove to be the lowest-cost satellites ever flown in space. The goal of NASA's PhoneSat mission is to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable, yet very inexpensive, satellite.

These are not the first smartphone satellites to be sent into orbit, but they’re part of a growing trend in finding ways to exploit consumer components and the advantages of nanosatellite architecture by the space agency.

Smartphones are particularly attractive because they are compact, are built to be relatively rugged, and already contain radio transmitters, processors, operating systems, sensors, cameras and GPS receivers.

"Smartphones offer a wealth of potential capabilities for flying small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications. They also may open space to a whole new generation of commercial, academic and citizen-space users." said Michael Gazarik, NASA's associate administrator for space technology in Washington.

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Satellites consisting mainly of the smartphones will send information about their health via radio back to Earth in an effort to demonstrate they can work as satellites in space. The spacecraft also will attempt to take pictures of Earth using their cameras.

Amateur radio operators around the world can participate in the mission by monitoring transmissions and retrieving image data from the three satellites. Large images will be transmitted in small chunks and will be reconstructed through a distributed ground station network. More information can found at: http://www.phonesat.org.

NASA engineers kept the total cost of the components for the three prototype satellites in the PhoneSat project between $3,500 and $7,000 by using primarily commercial hardware and keeping the design and mission objectives to a minimum. The hardware for this mission is the Google-HTC Nexus One smartphone running the Android operating system.

NASA added items a satellite needs that the smartphones do not have -- a larger, external lithium-ion battery bank and a more powerful radio for messages it sends from space. The smartphone's ability to send and receive calls and text messages has been disabled.

Each smartphone is housed in a standard cubesat structure, measuring about 4 inches square. The smartphone acts as the satellite's onboard computer. Its sensors are used for attitude determination and its camera for Earth observation.

NASA anticipates that the three PhoneSats will remain in orbit for about two weeks.




SOURCE  NASA

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