Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?
NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#12I wonder how they address radiation hardening and other space specific environmental drivers in this hardware.
Radiation, such as cosmic rays, would tend to cause transient bit errors in memory that would cause the phone to crash or otherwise stop working. The article mentions that they have a circuit that automatically re-boots the phone when it stops transmitting a signal, so it can recover from these problems.
Wow. That's surprisingly un-NASA. I wonder if they have qualified the MTBF? For this kind of solution to work, it'd have to be at least a couple hours.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#13Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?
Check out the pics on the side - they're using a balloon, I don't know if that gets it all the way there but hobbyists do it - one of the more popular hn'ers does it and has blogged about it a but but I forget who.
Doesn't look like anyone's reached space yet but:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/hackers-launch-satellites-120...
Interesting discussion on some guys who reached 100,000 feet:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750517
Edit: actually they're launching via rocket -
"Three NASA PhoneSats systems (two PhoneSat 1.0's and one PhoneSat 2.0) are scheduled to launch aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Sciences Corporation's Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va., later this year. "
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#14Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#15Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?
I imagine that part of the benefit to making small satellites is the ability to deploy a lot of them. Also, it's a good PR move when public perception is that NASA is bloated and wasteful. (Please, nobody give your opinion for or against that; I don't care :P)
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#16Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?
Check out the pics on the side - they're using a balloon, I don't know if that gets it all the way there but hobbyists do it - one of the more popular hn'ers does it and has blogged about it a but but I forget who. Doesn't look like anyone's reached space yet but: http://news.discovery.com/tech/hackers-launch-satellites-120... Interesting discussion on some guys who reached 100,000 feet: http://news.ycombinator.com/i…
jgc does that: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#17Maybe it would be a huge experiment in redundancy fault-tolerant computing.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#18...This raises questions about that other article that claimed everything had to be specially hardened to withstand radiation, no?
I had always assumed that was the case and the article text was obvious, but if we can launch off the shelf Android devices into space with no problems then why are the other NASA projects utilizing such out of date hardware?
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#19Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#20Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?
It would also be about size. If they can fit 10 satellites in the space used by a typical one it would make launch a lot more cost-effective.