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I worked on this project for a few months. We ran everything like a typical agile startup with weekly iterations and a lot of testing "MVPs". Really cool project. Also its all going to be opensourced! http://open.nasa.gov/plan/phonesat/

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That's awesome! Is following @NASA_Phonesat the best way to find out when that happens?

Yep!

What was your radiation testing like? My understanding is that there's a lot of skepticism that this thing will run for very long. NASA uses hardened processors to make sure radiation from outside the atmosphere doesn't affect electronics and using an off-the-shelf SoC built on a tight whatever nm processes has never been done before for fears of early mortality.

The only exception I can think of is laptops on the ISS and on the space shuttle, but those were within the shielding of the craft. On top of that, those laptops are hardened against radiation. I believe they took off the shelf Lenovo Thinkpads and added some shielding.

I'm guessing that the weather balloon got high enough where it might experience some radiation. I'm curious if they experienced any watchdog timer resets during that test flight.

These are probably low earth orbit satellites, still protected by the geomagnetic field and their orbits wouldn't spend much time in the Van Allen belt.

To be safe, I imagine they gave the phone a tinfoil hat.

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