Faced with a shrinking budget, NASA will in many ways need to reinvent itself if the agency hopes to continue leading the charge in space exploration. There’s perhaps no better example of that “do more with less” mantra than the PhoneSat project, the goal of which is to build the lowest-cost and easiest to assemble satellites ever placed into orbit. To create such a thing, engineers have turned to off-the-shelf consumer gadgets for parts, harnessing the internals of Google’s Nexus hardware as the brains of the operation. Powered by Android They’re starting small, however: the mission of PhoneSat 1.0 — powered by a Nexus One — is merely to stay alive for a short period of time and beam pictures of space back to ground control.

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NASA set to launch cheap Android-based satellites with Nexus hardware later this year

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