Android is everywhere.
The work space of Ken Oyadomari at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., looks like a triage tent for smartphones. Dozens of disassembled devices parts are strewn on workbenches. A small team of young engineers picks through the electronic carnage, carefully extracting playing card-size motherboards—the microprocessing heart of most computers—that will be repurposed as the brains of spacecraft no bigger than a softball. Satellites usually cost millions of dollars to build and launch. The price of Oyadomari’s nanosats, as they’ve become known, is around $15,000 and dropping. He expects them to be affordable for high school science classes, individual hobbyists, or anyone who wants to perform science experiments in space.
Continue reading… “Android is becoming the operating system for the Internet of Things”
