Nexus One Blasted 5 Miles Into the Sky [POV Video]
Apologies if you thought the title was an elaborate pornographic allusion, but I’m being completely literal: After the jump, you will see Google‘s recently shuttered Nexus One film itself BEING SHOT 28,000 FEET INTO THE AIR, or about 5.3 miles vertically.
The event was part of the PhoneSat initiative; with the support of the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, they strapped the smart phone with a parachute to a rocket with 1,000 lbs of thrust, to test whether the phones could be sent high enough to enter orbit. This captured video, by the way, is from the second phone launched into the sky. We won’t tell you what happened to the first one (it shattered into a million pieces).
According to the video description, the launch took place from the Black Rock Playa (Black Mesa Playa?) in Nevada on July 24. The smart phone came loaded with “specially programmed Android apps,” installed aboard James Dougherty‘s Intimidator-5 on a CTI N4100 load.
Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, which engages in research and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education launch activities, hopes to use “smartphone components to lower the cost of deploying a satellite and expect it to become even more affordable with every revision,” writes MAKE.
Many satellites are incredibly expensive and don’t even match the processing power of a Snapdragon phone. These tests could help generate highly cost-effective solutions for satellite launches in the future (SPACE.com reported in 2009 that the average satellite price will cost $99 million over the next decade, and the per-satellite launch price will hover around $51 million).
Video:
(via Engadget; image via jurvetson on Flickr)
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
