NASA launched a novel project in April, putting into orbit three
satellites that employ an off-the-shelf commercial smartphone as
the control system. The satellites hitched a ride on the maiden
flight of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket from NASA's
Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. Each of the three
"phonesats" was a 10-centimeter cube with a mass of about 1
kilogram. The trio operated in orbit for about a week,
transmitting back down to Earth. The satellite orbits naturally
decayed after about one week, as expected, and they re-entered
Earth's atmosphere on April 27. According to Chad Frost, chief
of the Mission Design Division at NASA's Ames Research Center,
the success of the mission was an important milestone. Building
a spacecraft of any sort generally means using very expensive
hardware and software, Frost said. But PhoneSat -- comparatively
very inexpensive -- breaks the mold. According to Frost, this
concept could be used to deploy groups of satellites to, for
example, monitor space we