SpaceApp winners worlds apart but orbit together

After some tough judging, engineers at SSTL and the Surrey Space Centre (SSC) have chosen the four winning Apps to go up in space on STRaND-1, the smartphone satellite. Entering a competition through Facebook, the four winners were chosen for their Apps’ scientific benefits, their creativity, or the App’s ability to get young people enthusiastic about science and technology.

Smartphones today are incredibly powerful, and whilst they share many features with conventional satellites such as cameras and sensors, a smartphone payload also means that STRaND-1 is packed with unique features. One of the main challenges for the Space App winners was to find an innovative way to incorporate some of the smartphone features, like the camera, screen, loudspeaker or microphone, in an App designed to run in the very different environment onboard a satellite. The winning Apps are diverse in nature, but all make smart use of the smartphone - enabling STRaND-1 to do things in space that no one has done before.


The different parts of STRaND

As any fan of the 1979 sci-fi classic ‘Alien’ will know, ‘in space no one can hear you scream’, but has anyone ever actually tested this hypothesis? That’s exactly what the student-run team Cambridge University Spaceflight group plans to do with their winning App. Their ‘Scream in Space!’ App uses the smartphone’s display, microphone and speakers to play videos of people screaming on a youtube video and record it in space. Aiming to interest young people in scientific methodology, the public are invited to upload videos of themselves to a website, from which the most popular screams will be played on the phone when the satellite is in orbit. Visitors to the website will later be able to view (and maybe hear!?) the results of this experiment.

From fun to functional: the scientifically focused ‘iTesa’ App will be using the phone and satellite magnetometers to record the magnitude and direction of the magnetic field about the phone during orbit, and will send this information back to Earth. ‘iTesa’ is hoping to provide proof of principle for more advanced scientific investigations and explore the possibility of using a mobile phone for future scientific studies in space.

Making use of the smartphone’s display, another winning App ‘STRaND Data’ will show the satellite telemetry that can then be imaged by an on-board camera for relay back to Earth. ‘STRaND Data’ is developed by the team behind educational satellite FUNcube and will enable interpretation of trends and provide a way of communicating with the smartphone in space.

For those tired of receiving conventional postcards of typical holiday destinations, joint winners ‘Postcards from space’ and ‘360’ have the answer! They will be using the smartphone’s camera to take images of Earth at the same time as using the satellite’s geolocation technology to establish its position when the photos are taken. The public will then be able to request their own unique postcard (satellite image) of a destination on Earth through a website, where a map will show more images and pinpoint them to where they’ve been acquired.

SSTL Project Manager, Shaun Kenyon showed his excitement over the winning Apps, commenting: “It was a tough choice, and we were impressed by all the competition entries, but we’re very pleased with our four winners. The Apps are both fun and sufficiently geeky, which means that STRaND-1 will now be able to do more than we had hoped for”.


Animation of STRaND-1

All Apps for STRaND-1 are now in development as the satellite is nearing the launch, planned for the beginning of 2012. The phone is also undergoing preparation for take off - Shaun told New Scientist in this recent article that he and the team have been "throwing the phone around a bit" to ensure it’s rugged enough for launch.

More updates on the progress of STRaND-1 are to follow. If you can’t wait any further check out the STRaND Facebook page at facebook.com/nanosats, or follow updates on Twitter @SurreyNanosats.