Android smartphone to control satellite in orbit

A satellite with an Android smartphone at its heart 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 the how well cheap, off-the-shelf consumer electronics handle the harsh temperature variations and microchip-blasting cosmic radiation of space.
If it can, say the satellite’s makers – Surrey Satellite Technology and the Surrey Space Centre in Guildford, UK – such spacecraft could become a lot cheaper to make. The orbiting phone was bought from a shop in Guildford’s High Street.
The phonesat lifted off at 12.32 GMT yesterday aboard an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Shriharikota, India. The rocket carried small satellites from India, France, Canada, the UK, Denmark and Austria. One of the two Canadian spacecraft was the suitcase-sized asteroid-spotter NEOSat, short for Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, which will watch out for incoming rocks like the one that came out of nowhere and exploded over Russia on 15 February.
But it is STRaND-1 – the UK’s first cubesat – that space-flight engineers will be watching with particular interest. The shoebox-sized satellite includes a Linux-based computer to maintain its orientation by controlling miniature plasma thrusters. But control will, at various points in the mission, be switched to the Android phone’s circuitry to see how its consumer-level electronics copes. Can accelerometers and GPS receivers operate as a cheap guidance system? No one knows. The satellite has already been successfully in contact with ground control and the team plans to contact the phone in the next few days. Radiation can be a major problem in space because incoming cosmic-ray protons have enough energy to flip a binary 1 stored in a memory chip to a 0, and vice versa, corrupting software and causing crashes. On the first paid-for SpaceX Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station last October, for example, one of the spacecraft’s flight computers was knocked out by a radiation hit. So the Google phone faces a challenging time.