An iPhone as a weapon of mass (times velocity squared) destruction.
On 4/27/2013 7:03 PM, J. Forster wrote:
Putting 100,000 items in space is a non-starter. The existing space trash
is already a big concern, and there have been seriuous proposals for
missions to clean it up. An iPhone, travelling at orbital velocity, has a
lot of kinetic energy!
There was an uproar years ago when the Westford Needles experiment was
launched, and those had a known mechanism to de-orbit the things.
As to tossing one out the docking port, unstabilized objects will tumble.
The chances of getting a useful picture of the area of interest are small.
YMMV,
-John
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On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Gregory Muir <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm curious if they ever have any problem with earth-based commercial
component
outgassing clouding the camera optics.
I went to a lecture on the idea of putting a cell phone like object in
orbit. The idea was that it should have a cost and size about like a
phone. This is very different from a pico-sat (a 4 inch cube)
because the pico sat costs $100,000 or more and the phone is under
$500 The idea is that $500 satellites you don't have to care about
failures. The plan was to place maybe 100,000 devices in orbit and as
they fail just launch another 1,000 or so at a time. The proposal was
to launch them from a rocket carried under an aircraft.
The goal was an un-jamable world wide data network. The phones would
self-organize into a mesh network. But no one is going to do this.
But still the question lives on: "What could you do with a iPhone in
orbit?" One idea was diagnostics. A big spacecraft like a space
station of crew capsule headed to mars might toss a few outside so
they could get photos of the exterior if they suspected a problem or
if the phone is cheap just to get snapshot. But I'd bet a bunch
they'd use a $100K pico sat for that.
--
Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California
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