The Nexus S in Space

On July 8th last year, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Atlantis(STS-135) in what was the final manned mission for the Space Shuttle program. On-board as well as 4 crew members and supplies for the International Space Station, were 2 Nexus S phones attached to SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), which NASA would use to further NASAs usage of HET(Human Exploration Telerobotics) in exploring how robots can help humans experiment and live in space more efficiently.

The other day, NASA updated their Blog with the results of their experiments, or at least released the data captured by the sensors on-board the phones. The sensor data was captured on a logging app which you can install on your own phone from the Play Store. The results are interesting but the cool thing I found for every day viewing is the video they took whilst using the phones whilst attached to the SPHERES :

If you`re into this the full blog is quite interesting, so head on over to the source to check it out. I’m hoping one day to release a weather balloon with a Smart Phone attached and recover it to get the data and video, just because the experiment intrigues me, perhaps if enough people are interested I’ll look into doing the launch and retrieval as a project for Ausdroid.