Wolfe, Cockrell and the rest of the team got a couple of Nexus smartphones from Amazon. They added extras, like plus-sized batteries and a powerful transmitter. They put it all in a metal case about the size of a Kleenex box. But the phones were still ordinary smartphones; they still had games on them. "We played around with Angry Birds on the ground," Wolfe says.
The PhoneSats hitched a ride on the very first flight of a commercial rocket called Antares, which NASA hopes will soon be resupplying the International Space Station.
"Within the first orbit after being released from the launch vehicle, we started receiving signals," Cockrell says. The signals from the satellites, which are named "Alexander," "Graham" and "Bell," are actually picked up by ham radio operators all over the world, who send them to the team at NASA Ames. The team is now in the process of using the small data packets to piece together photos taken by the different PhoneSats' cameras.
The achievement could mark big changes in the satellite business. Peter Platzer, CEO of NanoSatisfi, a startup company that's about to launch a small satellite into space using money raised on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, sees a world in which satellites aren't owned solely by powerful corporations and governments.
“ I think whenever you create this flexible platform that you let people program and decide what their own use is, it becomes really, really hard to predict where the combined genius of mankind will lead that platform.