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After some tough judging, engineers at SSTL and the Surrey Space Centre (SSC) have chosen the four winning Apps to go up in space on STRaND-1, the smartphone satellite. Entering a competition through Facebook, the four winners were chosen for their Apps’ scientific benefits, their creativity, or the App’s ability to get young people enthusiastic about science and technology.

Smartphones today are incredibly powerful, and whilst they share many features with conventional satellites such as cameras and sensors, a smartphone payload also means that STRaND-1 is packed with unique features. One of the main challenges for the Space App winners was to find an innovative way to incorporate some of the smartphone features, like the camera, screen, loudspeaker or microphone, in an App designed to run in the very different environment onboard a satellite. The winning Apps are diverse in nature, but all make smart use of the smartphone – enabling STRaND-1 to do things in space that no one has done before.

The different parts of STRaND

As any fan of the 1979 sci-fi classic ‘Alien’ will know, ‘in space no one can hear you scream’, but has anyone ever actually tested this hypothesis? That’s exactly what the student-run team Cambridge University Spaceflight group plans to do with their winning App. Their ‘Scream in Space!’ App uses the smartphone’s display, microphone and speakers to play videos of people screaming on a youtube video and record it in space. Aiming to interest young people in scientific methodology, the public are invited to upload videos of themselves to a website, from which the most popular screams will be played on the phone when the satellite is in orbit. Visitors to the website will later be able to view (and maybe hear!?) the results of this experiment.

Continue reading “SpaceApp winners worlds apart but orbit together”

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