24-01-11 Mobile phone to blast into orbit

British engineers are planning to put a mobile phone in space.The team at SSTL and the Surrey Space Centre in Guildford want to see if the sophisticated capabilities in today's phones will function in the most challenging environment known.The mobile will run on Google's Android operating system but the exact model has not yet been disclosed.It will be used to control a 30cm-long satellite and take pictures of the Earth in the mission later this year.Although mobile phones have been flown on high altitude balloons before,this would likely be the first time such a device has gone into orbit several hundred kilometres above the planet."Modern smartphones are pretty amazing," said Shaun Kenyon,the project manager at SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Limited)."They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz,and they have loads of flash memory.First of all,we want to see if the phone works up there,and if it does,we want to see if the phone can control a satellite." The venture is part of the company's quest to find more inexpensive,off-the-shelf electronics that can be used to lower the cost of its spacecraft designs.The mission is known as STRaND-1 (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration).It involves both the company and researchers from the University of Surrey's space centre (SSC).Much of the development work has been done in team-members' spare time.The mobile model being used will be a standard,sub £300-$450,smartphone available in High Street stores."We are not taking it apart;we are not gutting it;we are not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite - we're flying it as is," Mr Kenyon explained."And,in fact,we're going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well." Critical to the whole endeavour is the phone's operating system.Android is open source software which means the engineers can modify it to adapt the phone's functions.The great swings in temperature and the harsh radiation found in space require the phone be placed inside the satellite casing to give it some protection