NASA’S LATEST SPACE TECHNOLOGY – SMALL SATELLITE PHONES HOME

PhoneSat 2.4, NASA’s cutting edge cell phone CubeSat has called home. The modest spacecraft using an off-the-rack smartphone for a mind has finished checkout and sent back information affirming all frameworks are “go” for the spry spacefarer.

PhoneSat 2.4, a cube of roughly four inches square, weighs just around 2.2 pounds, and was created at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. It is first of the PhoneSat family to utilize a two-way S-band radio, permitting engineers to command it from Earth only. It is confirming the feasibility of utilizing smartphones and other economically accessible hardware in satellites bound for low-Earth orbit.

In April, NASA effectively showed a one-week mission with PhoneSat 1.0. With a normal orbital lifetime of up to one year, PhoneSat 2.4 will measure how well economically created hardwares perform in space over a long stretch of time. This imaginative use of commercially created techs for use in space provides for minimal effort, low risk, profoundly repetitive missions to meet some exceptional NASA science and investigation needs.

The rocket was among 11 organization supported cubesats sent on Nov. 19 by a NASA-fabricated Nanosatellite Dispatch Connector Framework on board an Orbital Sciences Minotaur 1 rocket for the U.S. Flying corps from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The use of smartphone provides for a large number of the functions the satellite needs to work, for example, calculation, memory, instant interfaces for communications, navigation and power, all amassed in a rugged package before the launch. Information from the satellite’s subsystems, including the cell phone, the power framework and orientation control framework are being down linked over amateur radio at a frequency of 437.425MHz.

The following PhoneSat, version 2.5, is planned to be launched in February, hitching a ride on board a SpaceX rocket. That rocket also is relied upon to perform in Earth’s orbit for a while and keep testing the two-way radio and orientation systems.

The PhoneSat series of missions are pathfinders for NASA’s next Small Spacecraft Technology mission, the Edison Demonstration of Small satNetworks (EDSN). The EDSN mission is made out of eight indistinguishable 1.5-unit cubesats, which are each roughly 4 inches by 4 inches by 6 inches in size and weighing around 5.5 pounds, which will be sent amid a launch from Kauai, Hawaii in 2014.

The EDSN mission will exhibit the idea of utilizing numerous little spacecraft as a part of an organized cluster to study the space environment and space-to-space correspondence systems. The eight EDSN satellites will each have a Nexus S cell phone for satellite charge and data handling, with a scientific instrument included as a payload on each spacecraft.

During EDSN, each CubeSat will make science estimations and transmit the data to the others while any of them can then transmit the majority of the gathered information to a ground station. This adaptability in command and control could make possible vast swarms of satellites to moderately screen the World’s atmosphere, space climate and other worldwide scale wonders.

The PhoneSat Venture is one of numerous development projects inside NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, one of nine projects inside NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The Small Spacecraft Technology Program creates and matures technology to upgrade and extend the capacities of small space crafts, with a specific focus on communications, propulsion, guiding, control, and self-governing operations.

For more data about PhoneSat, the Small Spacecraft Technology Program and NASA’s Space Innovation Mission Directorate, visit: