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Testing Mobile Phones For Controlling Space Missions
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in the UK are sending an Android handset into space in order to test whether mobile phone chipsets are robust enough to be be used as the basis for controlling future space missions — greatly reducing the cost and weight of spacecraft electronics. 'Once in space, the phone will be bombarded by cosmic and solar radiation, and experience temperatures that veer between extreme heat and cold. A computer on the ground will check whether the phone is able to operate normally in orbit, and if no problems are found the phone will be used to perform tasks usually carried out by the satellite's main avionics computer.'"
I wonder how many towers they'll connect to at that altitude.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
And the logical next step can only be that in commercial aviation, they will start offloading their avionics to the combined processing power of all the cell phones that happen to be on board. Finally, they are coming to their senses!
So, when can "us mortals" start using cell phones on airplanes?
It's bad enough having people change lanes into me on the freeway while yakking on these damned things. Now I have to worry about avionics computers crashing space stations into my house while blabbing away?!
Their App was rejected from the App store.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
are smaller and cheaper. That's basically what it says. "We want to use mass produced stuff because it's dirt cheap and made on smaller scales than this expensive rubbish we keep losing by taking a wrong turn at mars. We don't know if it'll work, so we'll send some into space and see what happens, and it will keep that marketeer who keeps asking us what we're really doing busy. He thinks we're working on the iSat. We're just seeing if space-tronics is snake oil or not."
Except it'd be stupid to use a phone per se... What they, of course, mean is to use small, hand-held tablet-style touch-interface computers. And that is nothing spectacular or notable.
But putting any tool that controls a space mission on a major public network (er... like a phone is), would be ludicrous for safety and security.
There's an app for that!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
1'/\/\ $0rr'/, d4\/3. 1'/\/\ 4Phr41D 1 (4|\|'7 d0 7|-|47
Can someone please tell them to use something a bit more powerful that has ECC RAM?
Memory bit flips will be much worse out there above the protective atmosphere...
The last thing anyone needs is a spacecraft malfunction due to a preventable memory error.
http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
Hasn't this already been done with Nokai phones...oh yes it has, but because everyone is so enamoured with Apple and Google these days they forget it has all been done before....yawn yawn yawn
Pretty soon the standard disclaimer will read: Not for use in the operation of nuclear facilities or spacecraft...
...they sign up for the unlimited roaming, text, data and minutes plan.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Abort planetary armageddon you stupid satellite, this is an order! Oh no, no cellular provider, we're doomed
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
And it is not going to be an iPhone.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12253228
They aren't stable enough to rely on here on earth, and are no where near 'hard' enough to be out of our atmosphere's protection.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't think putting a complex OS out there like Android/iOS or whatever is the solution in this space (pun intended) is the way to go. The custom solution having a long design cycle, will be completely optimized for power and speed. Depending on the workload, the generic phone hardware can be used but what advantage that is gained by using commodity hardware is lost in the lack of optimization of power and speed.
As long as you can live with larger overhead in the operating system and keeping within a power budget of the satellite design, sure phone hardware can be used. Then again, using an OS like these phone OSs is just overkill!
Their App was rejected from the App store.
No kernel source, no space rides.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
.. At least not too many people will be competing with you for mayor of the moon
asking why my phone sent her the txt an hour ago saying "Shields at 5% and falling"
Excuse me, but when the astronauts sleep, they see flashes in their eyes caused by energetic particles colliding with the fluid in their eyes and emitting Cerenkov light cones. Forgive me, but that's pretty damn extreme. Are you suggesting that similar impacts with the electronics of a smart phone aren't going to have serious implications both on the calculations the smart phone is making, and the physical hardware of the smart phone itself? I for one would not want to wager my life that a non-rad-hard processor in a smart phone was going to correctly calculate my re-entry vector. Here, hold these marshmellows, and call me on your smart phone after to reenter to let me know whether or not they're cooked :-)
Come to think of it, I guess one of the mandatory hacks would be to add a regular ethernet interface to the phone hardware.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
To test the phone, they could do more controlled experimentation here on earth... Also, most of the components were derived from those tested for the space programs and the work that NASA has already done, so it would seem that they don't need to reinvent the wheel. See (http://radhome.gsfc.nasa.gov/)
Soon..... Phones will control the launch of Satellites. These Satellites will actually be Phones with large antenna and thrusters. These Phones will serve as comm satellites for Phones on the ground. It's Phones all the way down.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Like they didn't seem to want to try an Arduino? Pretty cheap, prety light, lots of I/O options, simple IDE, reasonable power consumption I think... There is some discussion that some Arduinos are comparable to phones in power usage.
Anyways, they are thinking of using phone chipsets, so some of the micro boards could also work. And lets also assume they won't be using phone radios, there's some savings there, but lots of other alternatives seem to be at least as good.
Besides, Arduino in space sounds a lot cooler. And it's already been done, so we can razz the Brits.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
the article would have been titled "iPhones blast into space". It is an Android and suddenly we remember to use the term "mobile device".
So, unless they customize the boards for conductive heat removal and some temp control extras, it ain't going to fly. It's been done and evidently the UK guys don't know about it (all too common these days) or don't have a clue what that problem is.
But if they couldn't just buy the parts and make/program their own, they're not smart enough to succeed anyway -- those other problems like bit-glitches caused by radiation and so on will kill them if they don't do a very robust software design with various safeguards and redundancies. Why be stuck with a cel phone circuit board when you could just buy the same parts and add the stuff you really need on the mission all on the same board?
Back in the day, I worked on some stuff that was going into birds. They made us take this class on "What works and doesn't work in space". It was killer enlightening about what the issues are. Some of it has been obviated by new tech -- for example "no electrolytic caps" -- we have ceramics now that serve fine and are probably in most all new tech. "no potentiometers" "absolute minimum connectors" and an entire other course about how things wind up cold welding together in vacuum and most lubes don't work (including surprisingly, graphite which requires an oxygen layer to be slippery). Things like the tempco monster when using dissimilar materials need extra thought so things don't simply warp or explode at big temperature swings as well.
So, NASA has been there, and done that, and even they forgot some of the lessons when they pissed off most of their real engineers and substituted young punk academics with no real world experience...
Here goes history rhyming again.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
In other news, NASA is testing using banks of old P4's calculating PI to generate enough heat to thrust this test craft into space. Engineers have been quoted saying "They're very hot" and "we're almost at six digits now".
About a dozen groups have hooked smart phones to weather balloons and gone to the "edge of space" i.e. taken photos of the earth's curvature from 30-some miles up. A smart phone has all the basically components in a small, light package. Not least is self-location for when it lands to retrieve the pictures. All the group need do is cobble together an App to tie the pieces together.
I am seeing smart phones used in student robot competitions and science fairs. The students can concentrate on algorithms instead of hardware then.
How would that be different than ATT service 2day?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
So, let's just summarize. They want to give control of (no matter how insignificant) chunks of hardware in space to stuff that:
- Is designed at best for 60-70*C temp range (+/- 30-40 usually)
- Is assembled planning for 1atm +/- 0.10atm ish.
- Has a projected design life of 36 months (or thereabouts, again)
- Is re-designed every 12-18 months leaving previous designs generally unsupported
- Is considered and counted to be field-updateable for any more complex implementation
- Is fab'd/assembled by the lowest bidder
Sure, why not! Also, let's hope that the failures will end up re-entering and buring out instead of sticking on some kind of weird trajectory contributing to the junk already out there.
Wouldn't routerboards be more suited to these kind of extremes? Like Mikrotik or Ubiquity gear?
One important thing to consider: Orbital insertions of any kind aren't cheap or simple.... If you're getting a ride into orbit that's worth tens of thousands of dollars, you should consider not pinching too many pennies on the brains of whatever you're sending up. You can get away with a lot of stupid design stuff in LEO when you're at solar minimum, but wait till solar maximum or cross the radiation belts and you'll quickly find you've just wasted a very valuable ride up.
Dey tuk yer jub!
This looks like a stupid publicity stunt designed by some inexperienced publicity-seekers in collaboration with their organization's addle-pated and self-serving PR office.
I mean, what's not to like?
Err... radiation. If we wanted to know how a smartphone reacted to the LEO radiation environment, we could test that on the ground, and it would be a darn sight cheaper. But we don't need to do that, because we already KNOW that radiation will affect it badly, and that it doesn't include any mechanism to recover from latchups.
Heat transfer in vacuum. Maybe if it's just ticking over and not doing anything, a phone can survive in a vacuum--but my Droid gets plenty hot in air when it's doing anything, so heat dissipation is clearly going to be an issue. Sure, we can add heat pipes and radiators, and try to deal with it by conduction, but hey--rather than adding all that crap, why not avoid the problem to begin with by designing something sensible?
Wasted function. The phone is full of stuff that is completely useless in space: the lovely touchscreen interface (unless we're expecting vacuum-breathing aliens to be able to understand our icons, yes?), audio input and output (didn't anyone remind them that in space, no one can hear you scream?), the cellphone radio (which, if nothing else, would violate all sorts of national radio spectrum laws), etc. Those functions consume (that is, waste) watts of electrical power and add complexity (that is, unreliability). An engineer would have to be daft to design a system like this, when every gram costs so much to get into orbit.
Lots of COTS-grade hardware goes into space these days, and there is plenty of work being done to explore new (and less gold-plated) approaches to redundancy and reliability. But it's designed by engineers who actually know something and have actually thought about the issues.
Although the press release clearly describes the work of buffoons, it is POSSIBLE that the project itself isn't quite so silly as it looks. But based on what's been published, "sensible" doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Anyone knowns if WiFi works on space?
http://www.michel.eti.br
Seriously folks, when you have to start downloading apps like orbital grade IMU, or load up a skeezy solar electric sail driver, having LOIC installed by default will seem like less of a joke and more like a subsidized resurrected Star Wars program for DARPA...
I rarely use my phone for "chattering". It's mostly for data (especially e-mail).
Also, people have been known to chatter and talk without phones on the plane.