See the First Smartphone Pictures Taken by PhoneSats in Space

There were three smartphones floating in orbit, representing the first experimental "PhoneSats", and they did what smartphones do best -- shooting and transmitting pictures. While they obviously had upgraded radio transmitters, its still a long distance from space to surface and they were orbiting at a high speed, so the transmissions were a bit spotty. Even though, these images of Earth were reconstructed from photos taken by the trio of PhoneSats that launched on April 21, 2013 aboard the Antares rocket and ended a successful mission on April 27. The ultimate goal of the PhoneSat mission was to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space.

During their time in orbit, the three miniature satellites used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations. Every packet held a small piece of the big picture. As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to piece together photographs from the tiny data packets. The three nanosatellites burned up in the atmosphere a few days ag o as planned, but the next generation will already launch this year: www.phonesat.org

"During the short time the spacecraft were in orbit, we were able to demonstrate the smartphones' ability to act as satellites in the space environment," said Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA's Small Satellite Technology Program. "The PhoneSat project also provided an opportunity for NASA to collaborate with its space enthusiasts. Amateur radio operators from every continent but Antarctica contributed in capturing the data packets we needed to piece together the smartphones' image of Earth from space."

As part of their preparation for space, the smartphones were outfitted with a low-powered transmitter operating in the amateur radio band. They sent the image information to awaiting hams who worked with the Ames engineers to stitch together multiple, tiny images to restore the complete Earth view.

Piecing together the photo was a very successful collaboration between NASA's PhoneSat team and volunteer amateur ham radio operators around the world. NASA researchers and hams working together was an excellent example of Citizen Science, or crowd-sourced science, which is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. On the second day of the mission, the Ames team had received over 200 packets from amateur radio operators.

The project started in summer 2009 as a student-led collaborative project between Ames and the International Space University, Strasbourg.