NASA's Android-Powered Mini-Satellites

What could you do with $3500 and an old smartphone? You could toss the phone, take the cash, and buy yourself the next best smartphone. Or, with a bit of a DIY attitude, you could push the limits of this hefty piece of technology and use it to power something else.

That's the initial idea of the PhoneSat project, a small satellite project run by a team of engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center. The PhoneSat team has built and developed two small satellite models powered by Android smartphones, with the rest of the body constructed mostly of things you could buy at your nearest hardware store.

At a 2009 meeting of the International Space University's Space Studies Program, a group of young engineering students had a big idea: Why not try to develop a cheap satellite-control system using mostly off-the-shelf consumer technology items? They wanted to see if they could create something that could survive in space using existing technology, rather than spending resources to invest in building items from the ground up.