Smartphone-Powered Satellites Are Destined for Space Travel

Forget the in-dash car phone. If all goes according to plan in 2011, a group of British scientists will be rocketing an Android smartphone to infinity, and beyond.

Researchers at the University of Surrey and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in England are developing an Android-powered satellite to be launched into lower-earth orbit.

Dubbed Strand-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator), the 11.8-inch satellite will take pictures of Earth on a mission to be launched later in the year. Included in its control electronics are the guts of a commercial smartphone running Android.

With Strand-1, SSTL researchers want to show off the features and capabilities of a satellite while primarily using relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf components.

“The economic implications of this are really exciting,” mission concepts engineer Shaun Kenyon told Wired.com. “If these phones stand up to the extreme environments we see in space, it’s amazing to think we could eventually leverage low-cost mobile technology to use in satellite production.”

This isn’t the first time scientists have launched phones aboard rockets. Last year, researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center experimented with sending a couple of HTC Nexus One phones 30,000 feet into the atmosphere, attaching each phone as payload in a small rocket. One phone bit the dust hard after the rocket parachute failed, but the other one walked away from its mission unscathed, capturing more than two-and-a-half hours of recorded video on its 720 x 480-pixel camera.

Cost is a big motivation for the experiment. Many of the standard features seen in current smartphones — cameras, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi accessibility — are also found on satellites. But the smartphone components are a fraction of the size, weight and cost of those used in aerospace.

“We want to see if smartphones can actually survive up there, ” Kenyon said, “and we’ll be looking at how phone-specific sensors like accelerometers perform in space-flight conditions.”

SSTL will initially launch the satellite powered by an on-board computer, which will judge how the phone’s vitals are holding up and monitor for malfunctions in the phone’s hardware. After the data on the phone’s basic functioning are collected, the computer will be turned off and the phone will be used to control different parts of the satellite.

SSTL won’t divulge the manufacturer or model of the phone, but says it is indeed powered by the Android OS.

The satellite will weigh just under 10 pounds and come equipped with miniature reaction wheels for general torque and orientation control, as well as GPS navigation and pulsed plasma thrusters for space propulsion. Kenyon estimates the cost of the phone parts used to come in at less than 300 pounds, or just under $500.

SSTL has built and launched 34 satellites since being founded in 1981. The company specializes in smaller, low-cost satellites that often cost much less than those normally associated with space travel. In the past, the company has worked on training and development programs for NASA and the European Space Agency. The smartphone satellite project is being done in conjunction with the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey.

SSTL hopes to launch the satellite before the end of 2011.

Photo: Component smartphone parts to be installed within satellite. Courtesy of SSTL.

Updated 4:32 PST to correct the reference to “pulsed plasma thrusters.”

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