The first smartphone satellite will run Google’s Android operating system and is all set to be launched in its orbit. Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration (STRAND), after many months of development, is close to finalising a launch for later this year. Kenyon is the joint leader of the Strand-1 satellite team.
“We keep building it, and taking it apart, and tweaking it a little bit and building it up again, finding an interesting feature, then taking it apart,” said Shaun Kenyon an engineer at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited.
The smartphone will be placed at the heart of the 30-cm (11-inch) long Strand-1 satellite. At a side, a hole is cut for the camera. It will have apps like one designed to capture ‘postcards from space’, another app will try to prove conclusively whether it’s true that in space no-one can hear one scream. To do this, the phone will play screams and attempt to record them on its inbuilt microphone, according to Reuters. Applications are also built to exploit the phone’s inbuilt magnetometer – used for its compass – to measure the magnetic field around the satellite along with apps that will use the phones’ WiFi capability.
So, why put a smartphone in space? “Apart from computing capabilities of mobile phones that make them good candidates for spaceflight. Mobiles are remarkably robust, capable of surviving everything – from the extreme heat of a car dashboard in Africa to the cold of an Alaskan winter. They can be dropped on concrete, left in the rain and even survive the washing machine,” according to a Reuters report. “You’ve got this thing in your pocket which has the same computing capability as a supercomputer did in the 1970s,” says Kenyon. “All of that electronics has got billions and billions of dollars of R&D in it, so we’re just trying to make use of all that research and see if those electronics will work in space. It’s got sensors on it we all use for gaming, it’s got the comms, it’s got the camera,” Kenyon’s colleague, Chris Bridges, adds. “Apart from solar panels, this thing pretty much is a satellite.”
