Wonder if Apple will sue to get an injunction against the launch. :)
Not unless the satellites are rounded of course :)
NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, and I am currently working on GAGA-2: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/01/gaga-2.html, http://blog.jgc.org/2012/01/gaga-2-distance-rtty-test.html, http://blog.jgc.org/2012/01/gaga-2-mounting-flight-computer.... The vague plan is that GAGA-2 will be all about lots of cameras pointing in all directions. GAGA-3 will be about precision landing probably using a guided parafoil.
None of this is about orbit. Orbit == high velocity and altitude. Although high-altitude balloons regularly go about 40km that's still in the stratosphere and nowhere near space and the velocity is nowhere near what's needed.
These phone-based cubesats are a good idea. There have been plenty of phone-based balloon flights and there's no reason not to use them in satellites if you have some way of recognizing failure because of cosmic rays.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely the phone is going to be radiation-shielded inside the satellite. I see no critical contraction here...
I'm not convinced. Shielding against cosmic rays would require very heavy, thick lead walls to get any significant protection.
See my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4437792 Lead is terrible for cosmic rays, instead you want water.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#44I wonder how they address radiation hardening and other space specific environmental drivers in this hardware.
Is radiation hardening really that important when you're still this side of the Van Allen belt? My understanding is that it's not, but IANARS.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#45...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?
As soon as you cross the Van Allen belt you're exposed to the full blast of the solar wind, and standard electronics start failing. You can reach orbit without crossing this belt, so my understanding is that in low Earth orbit you're still shielded enough from the solar wind for it to not be a deal-breaker.
Assuming that you're referring to the stories about the Mars rover, Mars isn't geologically active enough to have its own equivalent of Earth's Van Allen belt, so the Martian surface is directly blasted by radiation originating from the solar wind. Any computer hardware going there will almost certainly need to be radiation hardened.
tl;dr: LEO != Mars
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#46From reading the article, there is no reason why Android was chosen specifically. So this experiment could have been done with any modern smartphone out there, they just happen to choose a couple of android phones. Is that right?
I've got nothing to do with this project and only know what I read in the linked article but the seemingly obvious reason they'd use Android phones, especially Nexus phones, is that they run on a nearly fully open source stack (minus some binary drivers), so you can go as deep into the internals as you want without resorting to jailbreaking and/or a lot of reverse engineering.
Wouldn't you still need to root the phone? The stack is definitely more open than on iOS though.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#47I wonder how they address radiation hardening and other space specific environmental drivers in this hardware.
We have short operating lifetimes and use orbits that minimise this problem.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#48I worked on this project for a few months. We ran everything like a typical agile startup with weekly iterations and a lot of testing "MVPs". Really cool project. Also its all going to be opensourced! http://open.nasa.gov/plan/phonesat/
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#49Why 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?
In addition to the other comments they also can launch multiple at the same time for redundancy.
Re: NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites
#50Will all these cheap satellites (from NASA or hobbyists, there are a couple of them on Kickstarter) cleanly de-orbit themselves or are we just adding up to the space junk at this point?
They are all put into orbits that decay to prevent this problem.