Mobile phones in space, Potentially lowering the cost of spacecraft design? Options

[jasedm]

An interesting mission outlined here proposes to blast a high-street mobile phone into orbit, to determine whether its processing power would be adequate to control a satellite in orbit.

Assuming the components within an ordinary handset can survive in space (it will be partly shielded by the satellite's casing) this might have appreciable effects on cost for some unmanned missions in the future.

[hendric]

Well, the software on a typical mobile phone is not really designed to deal with speeds in the km/s range. Doppler effects would begin to be significant at those speeds, and need to be accounted for in the frequency control of the analog front end.

Typical mobile phones aren't even designed for industrial/military spec temperatures, let alone deep space temps and potential radiation environments. They *might* be OK beneath Earth's protective magnetosphere, but I think the chances of sending an Android phone to Mars, let alone the moon, are pretty much nil.

Another concern is that the handset would be "skipping" across cells so fast that it would never be properly registered in any of them. This is actually one of the primary reasons why cellphones are turned off on planes - not because of the FAA, but because of the FCC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones...t#United_States

Maybe they will use satellite phones? They already have to compensate for the first issue, the last issue is irrelevant, and they'll just take their chances on the second one? The article however states they will use a "standard" phone, so it will be interesting to see how they handle those three problems above.