Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA

NASA is exploring ways to send a flotilla of small satellites to a destination, rather than one large orbiter. In a first test, three tiny satellites are now on orbit and beeping back at Earth. Why the idea could be an aid to scientific research.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / April 24, 2013

NASA's Phonesat aims to demonstrate the ability to launch one of the lowest-cost, easiest-to-build satellites ever flown in space ? capabilities enabled by using off-the-shelf consumer smart phones.

Courtesy of NASA

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That's no smart phone in your pocket or purse; that's the heart and soul of a satellite.

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Three satellites, to be exact, released into orbit on Sunday with the launch of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s new Antares rocket, the latest addition to NASA's stable of space-station resupply vehicles.

The tiny satellites, each occupying a cube four inches on a side, represent an experiment in using cheap but powerful off-the-shelf technology to run a new generation of small, affordable science satellites.

Two of these orbiters, which NASA has dubbed Phonesat 1.0, use the electronics and sensors packaged in a Google Nexus One smart phone to serve as on-board computers. Accelerometers that normally tell the phones which way you've oriented the screen now gather information on the satellites' orientation in space. And the cameras? Yep, snapshots of Earth from 156 miles up.

The third satellite, a prototype for Phonesat 2.0, uses a more powerful Nexus S, which also has a built-in gyroscope. Ultimately, engineers plan to use that extra capability to control solar panels and to control the spacecraft's orientation, instead of just recording it.

The notion of using a smart phone's innards to run a satellite grew out of informal hallway chatter, recalls James Cockrell, project manager for Phonesat at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The benchmark people often use as a point of comparison for the power of their favorite laptop or smart phone is the primitive computing power used in the Apollo program, which landed humans on the moon and brought them back safely in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Indeed, Mr. Cockrell describes a trip to the Internet that netted him the electronic-circuit diagram for the navigation and control computer used in Apollo's Lunar Excursion Module.

"Oh my goodness, you could build it in your basement" with a circuit board and a few transistors, he says.

A couple of years ago, he says, an engineer at NASA-Ames was drawing a similar comparison between his smart phone and today's satellites during an informal hallway chat. The engineer noted that a smart phone's processor is 10 to 15 times more powerful than the processors used in a conventional satellite's computer. A smart phone has much more memory. And it boasts a GPS receiver, gyroscopes, and accelerometers ? the sensors needed for navigation and to control a satellite's orientation.

"He said: 'I don't know why we couldn't make a satellite our of a smart phone,' " Cockrell recalls. Although it took a bit of additional salesmanship to convince folks higher up the organizational food chain, the Phonesat project was born.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/-gOZelEbRBk/Tiny-satellites-cellphones-cheaper-eyes-in-the-sky-for-NASA

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