Video: Follow Google’s new phone as it heads towards space

Digital postcard from the edge of space (Image: Andrey Armyagov/Shutterstock.com)

Seven styrofoam beer coolers sit lined up behind the open hatchback of an SUV, parked next to a soccer field in California’s rural Central valley. Each box contains a black Google Nexus S phone, mounted with their cameras facing out through a clear plastic cut-out in the side. Some of the boxes/phones have consumer-grade wide-angle sport video cameras mounted on the outside, odd bits of custom-soldered circuitry poke out of others.

In a few hours these coolers will be lifted to the edge of space, dangling beneath huge helium-filled weather balloons.

Sending small cameras to ultra-high altitudes with weather balloons is a do-it-yourself craze these days and today’s activities have more of a “let’s see what happens” feel than any rigorous product testing.


The team, made up of Google engineers and students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is mainly curious to see how well the phone’s sensors cope with a freezing cold near-vacuum.

Star gazer

If all goes well, once the craft return to earth, the team will read accelerometer, gyroscopic, and compass data to calculate the forces that the payloads experienced. The phones will also be running a number of apps including SkyMaps, an augmented reality star-gazing program that shows which stars would be in the sky, given the phone’s position and orientation.

To track and recover the balloons, the coolers have each been fitted with a dedicated GPS transponder, a radio transmitter and an antenna that will broadcast location and altitude.

With the first box ready for launch, Greg Klein, a ballooning hobbyist and Santa Cruz undergrad, leading the day’s operations, walks the 10-metre-high rig into the middle of the field. A final check verifies that the GPS transmitter is functioning, then he lets go. The balloon rushes skyward and the rest soon follow.

About 3 hours after launch, the balloons start to pop. Most have climbed higher than 32,000 metres. From that height, the coolers will take between 20 and 30 minutes to fall back to Earth, their speed arrested by small, florescent orange parachutes. The first one registers a soft landing. The others follow in turn.

After a couple hours’ drive south, and a few wrong turns down dusty country roads, we’re standing in the middle of publicly owned grassland. The smell of cows and fertilizer fertiliser hangs thick as the daylight fades to red, then black. Klein’s phone says our quarry is a couple several hundred metres away, but the cooler’s not revealing itself easily. After an unsuccessful hour’s search by flashlight, the team resolves to return later.

Watch them fall

Two days after launch, all but one of the coolers have been retrieved. In footage from the recovered cameras, one can see terrain fading away slowly as the blue curve of the planet appears. Then a jolt and the camera begins to fall and spin.

The phones survived the journey intact and still functioning. Video of the phone-screens at altitude shows that the apps worked as hoped, and Google engineers are sifting through data from the other sensors to see what they can glean. They are already planning future launches.

Zi Wang, a product manager for the Nexus S, says that while the launch was just for fun, it likely won’t be the last time the technology reaches space. He says Google is in talks with a UK-based satellite manufacturer to build small “commodity” satellites based on the core Nexus S technology. “The phone is powerful enough,” he says.