
NASA to use consumer Android smartphones in new satellites - anigbrowl
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/crosscutting_capability/edison/phonesat.html
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StuieK
I worked on this project for a few months. We ran everything like a typical
agile startup with weekly iterations and a lot of testing "MVPs". Really cool
project. Also its all going to be opensourced!
<http://open.nasa.gov/plan/phonesat/>

~~~
drzaiusapelord
What was your radiation testing like? My understanding is that there's a lot
of skepticism that this thing will run for very long. NASA uses hardened
processors to make sure radiation from outside the atmosphere doesn't affect
electronics and using an off-the-shelf SoC built on a tight whatever nm
processes has never been done before for fears of early mortality.

The only exception I can think of is laptops on the ISS and on the space
shuttle, but those were within the shielding of the craft. On top of that,
those laptops are hardened against radiation. I believe they took off the
shelf Lenovo Thinkpads and added some shielding.

~~~
jhaglund
These are probably low earth orbit satellites, still protected by the
geomagnetic field and their orbits wouldn't spend much time in the Van Allen
belt.

To be safe, I imagine they gave the phone a tinfoil hat.

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jcromartie
This is exactly what I was thinking about after the Curiosity launch. Space
exploration desperately needs to iterate faster, and tiny satellites running
commodity hardware/OS designs. Android seems perfect for this, considering how
easy it would be to deploy updates as .apk files, develop USB peripherals,
etc..

The article doesn't mention anything about radiation hardening, though. Are
they just not worried about it, because the idea is to make the satellite as
cheap as possible?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
By the sounds of things, these are temporary satellites not supposed to last
for very long, so the long-term aspects of radiation damage might not be such
an issue.

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pfedor
Why is it important to make satellites which are cheap to build? Isn't the
total cost dominated by the cost of bringing it to orbit anyway?

~~~
Gravityloss
No, the satellite is usually the expensive part.

Also, the reasons for not making launches cheaper has been "why is it
important to make launches cheap? Isn't the total cost dominated by the cost
of the satellite anyway?"

Also, ground processing and all can get very expensive because it requires so
many people and clean rooms etc and can be delayed. It depends if you think
it's part of the satellite or the launch cost.

Overall you need to start somewhere if you want cheaper spaceflight. If there
are cheaper satellites, then that's a big incentive for developing cheaper
means of launching (and launching much more often too!).

It's partly a chicken and egg style thing. Launches are extremely expensive
and far between and the big standing armies and facilities sit unused but have
to be trained, maintained and paid. It's hard to break that circle, but it
will be done, probably through some totally new technology that is first seen
as just toys.

~~~
Retric
It cost's over 20k to launch a Cubesat it often costs far less than that to
build them. Build costs and R&D can be hard to separate, but the replacement
costs for many generic satellites are often well below the launch costs.

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digikata
I wonder how they address radiation hardening and other space specific
environmental drivers in this hardware.

~~~
wtracy
Is radiation hardening really that important when you're still this side of
the Van Allen belt? My understanding is that it's not, but IANARS.

~~~
JosephRedfern
Yes, it is. <http://www.solarstorms.org/SEUavionics.pdf>

~~~
mturmon
Nice link, thanks. Very detailed.

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mrj
I bet they'll be stuck on 2.1 _forever_.

~~~
joenathan
I know this is sort of a joke, but the Nexus S shipped with Android 2.3
Gingerbread, and it's been updated to Android 4.1 Jellybean as of July 20th.

~~~
veemjeem
Is the update for the Nexus S OTA? I haven't gotten mine yet. In fact, I
haven't gotten the 4.0 (ICS) OTA yet. I heard they released a version but
pulled it... I have yet to see anything beyond 2.3 for my Nexus S.

~~~
joenathan
Here you go <http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1784497>

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shinratdr
...This raises questions about that other article that claimed everything had
to be specially hardened to withstand radiation, no?

I had always assumed that was the case and the article text was obvious, but
if we can launch off the shelf Android devices into space with no problems
then why are the other NASA projects utilizing such out of date hardware?

~~~
fchollet
Surely the phone is going to be radiation-shielded inside the satellite. I see
no critical contraction here...

~~~
shinratdr
Right but if we can just simply "radiation-sheild" off the shelf devices, why
didn't we do that instead of custom building a robot made of specifically
radiation hardened parts that are also much more expensive?

Why was the most important consideration by far for the processor in the
previous NASA project was designed from the ground up to be radiation-hardned,
but yet we can launch this no problem?

I just don't get it. I also don't appreciate the downvotes. I'm not trolling
or looking to start an argument. I don't have dog in this race, I'm genuinely
confused.

~~~
Moto7451
I'm a huge fan of the possibility of heavily shielding off the shelf parts. It
seems logical to me to try to incorporate it into unmanned craft.

However, I'm guessing there are probably people who have simulated this and it
probably hasn't worked out to be very economical for past missions. I think
part of the problem is that the level of shielding required would really limit
your payload to orbit. It's probably going to take a huge amount of material
seeing as even the Space Shuttle couldn't act as a perfect buffer between
computers and radiation.

From a NASA article[1]:

"Designers also found out that laptops would crash when the shuttle passes
through the "South Atlantic Anomaly," which is an area where the magnetic
field draws in to Earth, again offering less radiation filtering for
spacecraft flying through it."

Completely speculating here, but I would imagine that part of this experiment
is to get operational experience with using standard grade electronics in
space.

From the OP's article, the satellite has:

"...a watchdog circuit that monitors the systems and reboots the phone if it
stops sending radio signals."

Anything with a human or with a high price tag attached to outages can't work
with that caveat. If DirectTV's satellites did that, people wouldn't stay
signed up for long. Imagine a Mars rover having to reboot every half hour...
not very convenient.

But perhaps NASA might want to know if they can cheaply build "disposable"
orbital experiments... i.e. ones that can complete their missions in a few
hours. The sort of reliability where you just have to deal with the odd 30
seconds of rebooting every so often could be alright, especially if the
payload can be stowed on a cargo ship and simply shoved out an air lock like
the SuitSat[2].

Again spitballing, maybe they will find that things work out more or less OK
if they send up five moderately shielded Raspberry Pis and they "vote" a la
the Space Shuttle's flight computers[3]. If so, maybe that opens up space
experimentation to universities with smaller budgets to squeeze onto
resupply/manned launches that happen to have a spare square foot of space.

[1]
[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_shuttlecomputers.html)

[2] [http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2006/26...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2006/26jan_suitsat/)

[3] <http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch4-4.html> (search for "vote" to get
to the specific spot detailing how this works)

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cromwellian
Wonder if Apple will sue to get an injunction against the launch. :)

~~~
pooriaazimi
With all respect, this isn't the kind of comment I've come to expect from HN
lot on a serious article like this. It belongs to
Verge/TechCrunch/Engadget/Gizmodo, or the the articles about the court ruling
(those from yesterday).

~~~
esolyt
Actually the comment had a purpose and was trying to raise awareness. The fact
that it made you angry perhaps shows that it worked? Perhaps it might make you
reconsider your opinions about your favorite company.

~~~
ceejayoz
I don't think a comment on HN, of all places, is going to do any raising of
awareness of Apple's patent position.

Reddit, Youtube, MSNBC, etc., maybe. HN? C'mon.

Also, to get the comment, you already had to have that awareness. It wouldn't
make any sense to someone who doesn't know about the Apple vs. Samsung
lawsuit.

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jhull
And you thought Apple was famous for their "product launches"

~~~
raverbashing
Looks like the Mythbusters will be invited for this next product launch and
they will bring a lot of explosives with them.

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roedog
This is an interesting experiment. I think it creates an opportunity to
discuss the whole cost picture. COTS alone will only achieve minor cost
reductions relative to the whole enterprise.

Testing costs were orders of magnitude more than the cell phones. They ran
tests with Thermal Vac, vibe and shock, and weather balloon. Each test
required time at expensive test facilities and hundreds of hours.

Launch and operations will require additional hundreds of hours of labor to
prepare and collect data. It will also require time on expensive range assets.

For example, a launch readiness review, where they determine if everything is
ready to go, would involve a dozen engineers for a few hours. This meeting
alone would cost more than the all the phones they bought to test on the
ground and fly.

~~~
pjungwir
I'm sure it will take a long, gradual process, but I hope that using cheap
components will lessen the cost of failure, so we can spend less on testing,
too. Now if only we could reduce the cost of launch....

~~~
roedog
Yeah, cost control is a perennial problem. I think it is so hard to solve
because, it seems to me, that any solution must address interlocking
technical, cultural, commercial, and policy & political concerns all together.

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sylvinus
Will all these cheap satellites (from NASA or hobbyists, there are a couple of
them on Kickstarter) cleanly de-orbit themselves or are we just adding up to
the space junk at this point?

~~~
StuieK
They are all put into orbits that decay to prevent this problem.

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aspratley
Let's just hope Apple haven't patented smartphones in space already.

~~~
Tichy
Wonder how they solve the orientation problem.

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humbyvaldes
Not so much with Android, but so much of Nasa's technology has spread to the
private sector it's nice to see them using this to their advantage.

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Mythbusters
From reading the article, there is no reason why Android was chosen
specifically. So this experiment could have been done with any modern
smartphone out there, they just happen to choose a couple of android phones.
Is that right?

~~~
jcromartie
What else would they use? It seems pretty obvious to go with Android.

~~~
roedog
NASA flies a lot with VxWorks. They could have ported it to the nexus.

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ConstantineXVI
At which point the satellites can no longer be open source. Perhaps more
importantly, Android already runs on the Nexus S; VxWorks doesn't. It defeats
the purpose of using commodity hardware if you start over from scratch on the
software running it.

~~~
roedog
I agree VxWorks would require additional porting effort. I also think that
Android was the right choice for this mission.

I'm not sure I agree with the implied high priority placed on open source. The
relative development costs of android, real-time linux, or even a commerical
RTOS are noise in the flight software development budget. Reducing the cost is
a more important driver to making space more accessible.

The big benefit, if these android cube sats fly successfully, would be to
retire a lot of risks - thus opening the door for future programs to fly with
android.

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malkia
Maybe it would be a huge experiment in redundancy fault-tolerant computing.

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rjzzleep
weird why not just use openembedded ? i forgot what the other one was called.

