First Satellite Powered by Smartphone Launched, Ironsky Style

One of the seven satellites orbited by an Indian rocket yesterday has a Google Nexus smartphone connected as its central control unit! For anyone who saw the hilarious comedy Ironsky about the space nazi invasion from moon last year, this sounds familiar--after all, the "discovery" of an iPhone as the most advanced and super-compact computer that could be used to interface with and finally power a giant nazi spaceship on the moon with a still mechanical computer was the reason for their invasion in the Finnish movie.

The strange story of Ironsky turns out to be not so far from reality, since cumbersome and unreliable electronics with very limited capabilities have been one of the most hindering and cost-exploding parts of space-going devices until recently. But now a satellite with an Android smartphone at its heart, bought off the shelf in a shop beside the lab, is now orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 785 kilometres. Called STRaND-1, the satellite's incorporation of a Google Nexus One phone is a bold attempt to test how cheap consumer electronics handle the harsh temperature variations and microchip-blasting cosmic radiation of space--which in the case of success could make satellites and spacecraft a lot cheaper, since smartphones already incorporate a variety of necessary components like GPS, accelerometers and a linux based software platform.

UK's first cubesat was made by Surrey Satellite Technology and the Surrey Space Centre based at the University of Surrey, Guildford. The shoebox-sized satellite also includes a Linux-based computer as the primary system to maintain its orientation by controlling miniature plasma thrusters. But control can, at various points in the mission, be switched to the secondary Android phone computing unit to see how its consumer-level handle the tasks thrown at it. Can accelerometers and GPS receivers operate as a cheap guidance system? It was never tested until now. The satellite has already been successfully in contact with ground control and the team plans to contact the phone in the next few days.

Space flight is becoming more and more easy and fun to do with the new trend of small and fast to build nano-satellites, with NASA just announcing today that 24 of them to be built by US universities have been selected to be launched over the next 4 years, and which soon may even be often controlled by widely available smartphones. As an early example, the STRaND-1 smartphone already carries four Android apps written by the winners of a Facebook competition to fly "your app in space".