Space apps: smartphone at heart of satellite mission

In space, no-one can hear you scream, right? Everyone who knows some physics, or who's seen Alien, knows it. But is it always true? A smartphone app that's headed for low Earth orbit will soon tell all. Kind of.

Called Scream In Space, the app is one of four that have won a place on a super-cheap (£70,000) satellite called Strand-1 that aims to use an Android-based smartphone's accelerometers and GPS receivers as the heart of its guidance system - but which will also allow the phone's camera, speaker, mic and touchscreen display to run some interesting orbital apps. The phone, by the way, is a Google Nexus One.

After a competition run on Facebook, mission planners at the UK's Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) and the Surrey Space Centre today announced which apps will fly on the phone.

(Image: Surrey Space Centre & Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd)

Scream In Space, from a UK student ensemble, called Cambridge University Spaceflight, will run videos of people screaming on the phone's display, and these will be recorded by a minicam pointing at the phone. They will then check if the vibration from the phone's loudspeaker is picked up through its chassis by the mic - effectively making the scream in space audible, despite the vacuum in the unpressurised spacecraft.

That app, of course, is just a bit of science-related fun. Those who can scream the most "creatively" - in yet another Facebook competition - stand the best chance of being uploaded to orbit, which will be somewhere between 350 and 500 kilometres high - in other words, properly in orbit at ISS levels, unlike the sub-100-kilometre efforts some have managed with phones on balloons.

The more serious apps include 'Postcards from Space' and '360' which SSTL says count as one app because they will both take pictures of the earth using the phone's camera to work out exactly where the satellite is. Hopefully, says SSTL, schoolchildren will be able to order a satellite picture of the Earth that the Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera will shoot for them.

More earnest still is an app called iTesa which will use the satellite's onboard magnetometer to measure variations of the Earth's magnetic field. And finally, telemetry data on the satellite's progress through space will be visible on the phone's screen thanks to an app called Strand Data, developed by the people behind the educational Funcube satellite.

Android's reprogrammability and open-source nature made the system an obvious choice for the spacecraft over Apple's iOS, says Kenyon. Google donated the flight phone, he says, and his colleagues have been "throwing it around a bit" to ensure it is rugged enough for launch.

The Strand-1 mission is seeking a rocket launch to piggyback on sometime between January and April 2012. It's orbit will be designed, as international space debris rules stipulate, to bring it back down to Earth within 25 years.

Let's hope the phone has enough credit on it.