NASA recently launched a trio of satellites that could possibly be the cheapest satellites ever flown in space. The satellites were something you probably carry or are holding right now: smartphones.
The NASA mission, dubbed "PhoneSat," launched three beefed up Google-HTC Nexus One smartphones (nicknamed "Alexander," "Graham" and "Bell") into space on April 21. The idea was to figure out whether consumer-grade smartphones like these can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space, as explained in the video above.
The phones snapped photos hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface. That photo information was then sent in "packets" via a ham radio frequency. Back on Earth, hundreds of amateur ham radio operators helped with decoding the information from the satellites. With that assistance, NASA was able to reconstruct images of the Earth (see below image from PhoneSat-2, "Graham").
The successful photo project shows that the turnout was an "excellent example" of "Citizen Science" or crowdsourced science, according to NASA.
"Three days into the mission we already had received more than 300 data packets," Alberto Guillen Salas, an engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center and a member of the PhoneSat team, said in a statement. "About 200 of the data packets were contributed by the global community and the remaining packets were received from members of our team with the help of the Ames Amateur Radio Club station, NA6MF."
This approach is a pretty creative way to fund space exploration for NASA, which has been under a tightened budget. Despite a $17.7 billion proposed NASA budget for 2014, $200 million would be cut from the agency's planetary science division, Space.com reported.
Each NASA smartphone satellite stayed in orbit until April 27, but unfortunately they did not make it back home. As expected, the phones all burned up when they re-entered Earth's atmosphere.