What is "phonesat"

PhoneSat is an ongoing NASA project, part of the Small Spacecraft Technology Program, of building nanosatellites using unmodified consumer-grade off-the-shelf smartphones and Arduino platform and launching them into Low Earth Orbit. This project was started in 2009 at NASA Ames Research Center ( Moffett Field, California).

When the project started, a typical smartphone had a faster CPU and more memory than the average satellite, one or two cameras, multiple acceleration and rotation sensors, a compass, a GPS receiver, radios, and a Li-Ion battery, all of which had benefited from significant research and development efforts and economies of scale in the telecommunications industry to reduce cost.

The construction cost of the first version of PhoneSat satellite was reported to be US$3,500 and that of the second version was reported to be below US$7,000. The chassis is a single standard CubeSat bus and sized 10cm × 10cm × 10cm (around 4 inches per side). Control software and firmware was made open source whenever possible.

The PhoneSat project was selected by Popular Science magazine as one of eleven "Best of What's New" in the aerospace category in 2012.