A group called NexusOne PhoneSat project made up of NASA Ames students, some Google employees, and two NASA contractors strapped Googles Nexus One to the back of a rocket and launched it from the Nevada desert high into the atmosphere to test the device’s performance up in the air.
It seems that this project may have been partically inspired by the project of two MIT students in 2009, who flew a camera up to 93,000 feet in an old weather balloon and photographed the curvature of the earth, for the low low price of $148. This is well short of the widely-accepted Kármán line, which is at 100km (62 miles) up, but it’s in the stratosphere, and it’s still impressive. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth. The project was no doubt also inspired by the Cubesat initiative led by Stanford and California State Polytechnic Universities which has sought to develop very small satellites which can be affordably launched by universities.
The group’s two Nexus Ones hitched rides on anIntimidator-5 rocket to go 28,000 feet into the atmosphere. The rocket was launched by the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, a group of rocket enthusiasts.
“The purpose of flying the Nexus One is to find a low-cost satellite solution,” says Thomas Atchison, chairman of the Mavericks Foundation. “The radio, processing power, sensors and cameras in smartphones potentially have the same capability as those in satellites.”
The idea is to drive down satellite cost by using off-the-shelf products and components, says Atchison.
“Today’s satellites are the size of Greyhound buses,” he says. “But I believe they are going to get smaller and more frequently deployed. This is a first-step effort.”
The smartphone in your pocket has about 120 times more computing power than the average satellite, which has the equivalent of a 1984-era computer inside. “You can go to Walmart and buy toys that work better than satellites did 20 years ago,”” said NASA physicist Chris Boshuizen.
The whole goal of the project is to make satellites cheap and affordable, so that anyone with bit of time and a couple of thousand dollars can send their own satellite into space.
Upgrading the computing power of satellites using cellphones would mean increased satellite capabilities, possibly including artificial intelligence.
“We’re not sure yet exactly what people will want to do with their satellites, and that’s the point,” said NASA education specialist Matt Reyes. “What can you imagine doing with your phone in space?”
If the cellphones ultimately get used to power satellites, they will probably be sent up without a screen and with a different battery to make them lighter. The screen and battery make up 90 percent of the Nexus One’s weight.
Next, the team will build a stabilizing mechanism for the satellite using the cellphone, $100 toy gyroscopes and parts similar to those of the Mindstorms Lego, so the satellite can orient itself in space. By installing three spinning gyroscopes and getting them to spin at different velocities, a satellite can move in any direction. The same technique is currently used on many satellites, but requires multimillion dollar technology.
Surrey Satellite Technology is now planning on launching this idea into space later this year with the STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) being made from advanced and off-the-shelf components of one of Googles Android smartphones.
It’s also rumoured that the FAA may approve cellphone use of satellite airwaves, at the request of Lightsquared a satellite broadband startup. This would be a nice tie up with extremely cheap, tiny Android powered satellites. It’s possible to imagine a super-cheap satellite broadband network.
