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NASA's Smartphone Satellites Are Making Space More Accessible Than Ever

The PhoneSats project might seem like small potatoes compared to something like the Curiosity rover, but seeing a new rocket design launch tiny, cheap satellites is a great peek into NASA's leaner future.
PhoneSat 1.0 shows off just how small a nanosatellite can be.

NASA's partner Orbital Sciences successfully launched its Antares rocket last night for the first time, in what was the first launch at the new Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It's good news for NASA's future, as the Antares rocket will help ensure NASA has a low-cost means of lifting payloads into orbit and to resupply the International Space Station following the closing of the shuttle program.

The Antares rocket lifted the equivalent of , which means it should be ready for its first ISS resupply mission sometime later this year. But it's the Antares' other payload that's rather fascinating: a trio of HTC Nexus One smartphones that NASA turned into "nanosatellites" as part of its PhoneSats project.

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The PhoneSats project might seem like small potatoes compared to something like the Curiosity rover, but seeing a new rocket design launch tiny, cheap satellites is a great peek into NASA's leaner future. The PhoneSats, which required a total of between $3500 and $7000 in parts (that vague estimate is NASA's, not mine), are now currently in orbit, with radio transmissions tracked by citizen scientists around the world .

The phones are equipped with larger batteries, stronger radio transmitters, and are packaged in , but otherwise are basically satellites powered by Android. The goal of this first flight is to track their orbit and attempt to use the phones' cameras to take pictures of the Earth, which will be beamed down to observers around the world in short bursts. As they're basically passive craft, they're expected to fly for around two weeks before falling back into Earth's atmosphere.

Along with NASA's CubeSats Initiative, which helps offer space on bigger missions to small, modular satellite designs, the PhoneSats project is part of NASA's effort to develop small, cheap satellite systems. NASA's budget woes have led many, including myself, to lament the potential decline of Big Space, which admittedly took a huge hit with the wrapping up of the shuttle program. But just as missions like Curiosity's show that Big Space is still live and well, the renewed emphasis on keeping things cheap has sparked initiatives like PhoneSat that are making space far more accessible for private citizens.

The era of private spaceflight, fueled by companies like Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, is already pushing spaceflight costs down and innovation up, but we're still a ways off from average Joes taking a space tour. But as the International Space Apps Challenge showed, bringing innovation to space in small packages is more realistic than ever. I checked out the NYC Space Apps hackathon, and the number of projects and ideas was outstanding (expect more on the hackathon later this week), and it all came with NASA support.

So yeah, NASA basically just launched 2013 versions of Sputnik up into space, but it means more than that. NASA appears to now be dedicated to getting objects into space as cheaply as possible, which means a whole wealth of private, semi-pro, and enthusiast satellite engineers and hackers can now throw their ideas into the ring. That's exciting enough on its own, as it means we're entering a new wave of space innovation. But what's even more exciting is that a lot of those ideas are really good, and if the PhoneSats are any indicator, they've got a good chance of getting off the ground.

@derektmead