Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android Phone as Autonomous Micro-Satellite: PhoneSat”.
Phonesat is a project currently at nasa ames, and the goal of the project is to make a cubesat, which is a very small satellite that uses a cell phone as its central processing unit. So we use a nexus one, because the android operating system runs on the phone and it tends to be very easy to sort of hack in different kinds of ways to achieve the results that we’re looking for in the system. So, in addition to the cell phone, we also have an arduino processor on board that actually watches the cell phone output to make sure that the cell phone is still running. So you may know that your cell phone might crash every once in a while.
We have a system on board to make sure that that doesn’t kill the satellite. So the goal at the moment is to sort of prove that cell phones can actually work in space and be used as the central processing units of satellites. So most of the sensors that we have on board are used to actually monitor the condition of the cell phone and make sure that it’s working properly. You .