The Remains of PhoneSat

As seen at Maker Faire – I knew it looked familiar, because our rocket crew at RocketMavericks helped them with their g-load testing by having an unscheduled ballistic reentry into the Black Rock Desert playa! I promised to share the lucite enclosed relic with Planet Labs today.

You can see a couple of the founders in the video, and me digging my V-2 out of the crater in the background. That’s where the intrepid team from NASA (now Planet Labs) who figured out that a stock Android HTC phone can work just fine as a low-cost satellite (it has a better processor than many satellites, and decent multi-axis sensors and GPS. They already know it works in a vacuum.)

For deployment from the ISS, it is mounted in a cubesat chassis with extra batteries and a yellow metal tape measure for an antenna.