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.'"

Comments

Reason Why They Aren't Using an IPhone

[Ancantus]

Their App was rejected from the App store.

Re:Reason Why They Aren't Using an IPhone

[PopeRatzo]

No self respecting robot would use an iPhone

If you visit your local Starbucks, you will find that you are mistaken.

NASA got burned on this, literally

[DCFusor]

Let a bunch of ignorant college kids try and use COTS stuff in their smaller, faster, cheaper, better plans. Almost to a man, they didn't understand certain really important issues, as in -- things that work fine fanless in air burn up in a heartbeat in a good vacuum from their own power when the only way to lose heat is by radiation -- which doesn't remove much till things get very hot indeed. Even micropower opamp chips die in vacuum. After all, there are such things as one watt incandescent bulbs....that get white hot with one watt input, and some of them aren't even in a vacuum! Ok, spread that heat around a 1 watt cpu, which is bigger -- and it's still above the destruction temperature of a chip -- well above.

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.

Re:Sure, NASA allows them on their flights...

[mr1911]

No phones on planes, please.

With the status quo, I look at you when we are boarding and presume you are an idiot.

When phones are allowed on planes, after a two hour flight with you chatting away with any moron in your phone book that will listen to you I will know beyond a shadow of a doubt you are an idiot, and be able to list a few dozen reasons why.

Let's keep the mystery going.