Science & Environment

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Phones in space! NASA launches low-cost satellites

You might have missed the news. After all, NASA launches all sorts of things into space. Including many satellites. But these latest satellites are not your normal satellites.

On Sunday, NASA launched three smartphones into space. Phones. Like the kind you can buy at H.H. Best Buy or any mall kiosk.

Why? To show that these smartphones can act as low-cost satellites. How low-cost? According to 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."

The goal of the 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."

Transmissions from the phone-satellites have been received at ground stations on Earth. They are expected to remain in orbit for as long as two weeks.

The "spacecraft" will try to take pictures of Earth using their cameras. If that's not cool enough for you, NASA says that "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."

How can you participate? Go to