A ride to the stratosphere and back has now become a rite of passage for smartphones. Space enthusiasts are attaching devices such as the Motorola Droid, G1, HTC Evo and Nexus One -- not to mention an array of digital cameras -- to weather balloons or rockets, then sending them high into the stratosphere and beyond. With integrated GPS systems, cameras and fast processors, smartphones are computing devices available to all. That’s why space enthusiasts are turning to them to do things that would have otherwise required custom components or a number of specialized devices. “What you are seeing is a grass-roots initiative to reach for the stars,” says Bobby Russell, founder of Quest for Stars, a nonprofit organization that works with high school students to promote science and technology. Driving the interest of hobbyists are the latest crop of smartphones and even digital cameras because the devices are cheap and fairly rugged. “Now, it's all there off-the-shelf for the taking,” says Russell. “So why reinvent the wheel?” Photo: A Google G1 phone gets ready to head into the atmosphere, surrounded by members of the Noisebridge hacker space. Photo courtesy: Mikolaj Habryn, Andrew Gerrand, Christie Dudley.

Droid Soars to 107,000 Feet Just how high can a phone go? The Motorola Droid launched on a weather balloon from an airport for sailplanes near San Diego probably holds the record at 107,000 feet. The phone, launched as part of a pilot program to stoke interest among students in science and technology, survived a stunning flight and stayed alive where other gadgets failed. “I love the Droid,” says Russell. “It's my personal phone and I wanted to find a way to connect it to this project. We also wanted to be the first to send the Droid up in space.” For this flight, Russell and his group used a high altitude weather balloon (about 15-20 feet in diameter when inflated) to carry a payload kept in a thermally insulated Styrofoam box. The payload included three cameras: a Canon camera that could record up to 200 minutes of high definition video, a second 12-megapixel camera that could shoot still pictures once every seven seconds, and the Droid’s 5-megapixel camera positioned upwards to take pictures of the balloon. The group loaded the Droid phone with Droid Lapse, a time-lapse photography app available in the Android Market and added a GPS tracking program called Accutrack. Other devices on the flight included a Garmin eTrex GPS system connected to a ham radio transmitter and a Motorola i290 mobile phone. A temperature and humidity recorder logged data that would be made available to students later. Ultimately, the Droid survived where the Garmin and the Motorola i290 phone failed. The Droid phoned home its location about four hours after impact. Russell and his colleagues are now waiting for park rangers to retrieve the device. Photo: The Quest for Stars team gets the balloon ready to carry the Motorola Droid. Courtesy: Quest for Stars

HTC Evo Waits for its Chance in Space 25-year old Android app developer Danny Pier plans to take the Evo where it hasn't gone before. And for help he turned to Kickstarter, an online fund-raising site. On the site, Pier laid out his dream: To build a stable Android application that can take pictures and video reliably once in the air. “The goal is to take a small, tiny, baby step towards making space more accessible for anyone,” says Pier. “My grand hope for this project is that it will help any kid or Joe Shmoe who wants to explore space on his own.” So far, 66 Kickstarter users have contributed $2,052 for the project called Astdroid. Pier wants to make the entire process collaborative and open. He has been blogging, twittering and hopes to share video and broadcast the launch using Ustream. Pier hopes to launch the Evo next month from a site west of Denver, Colorado. “We will be going with this balloon to 90,000 feet,” he promises. Photo: Danny Piers with his weather balloon that will ultimately carry the Evo up. Courtesy: Danny Piers

Nexus One Rides a Rocket The NexusOne PhoneSat project, comprising a group of NASA Ames students, some Google employees, and two NASA contractors, are trying to give new meaning to the phrase “satellite phone.” The group used two Nexus Ones to show how low-cost satellites could be created. A smartphone today has about 120 times more computing power than the average satellite with its equivalent of a 1984-era computer inside, they say. The Nexus One phones hitched rides on an Intimidator-5 rocket to go 28,000 feet into the atmosphere at a maximum speed of mach 2.4 or about 1,800 miles per hour. Though one of the phones came back with a shattered screen, the other device captured up to 2.5 hours of video. Photo: Retrieving the Nexus One cell phone from the rocket post-launch. Photo by Matthew Reyes / Flickr

The Android G1 Gets Up to 70,000 Feet A $25 balloon bought off eBay helped carry an Android-based G1 phone, two cameras and other assorted electronics up nearly 70,000 feet into the atmosphere. “We wanted to see if you can get a balloon up to high altitudes that can be ultimately used for ideas such as mounting a telescope or measuring radiation levels,” Mikolaj Habryn, one of the participants in the project told Wired.com. The entire project, conceived and launched in just about a week, comes from members of Noisebridge, a collectively operated hacker space in San Francisco. Along with the G1 phone, the group put two cameras that were tweaked to take snapshots every 30 seconds. They got some beautiful photos of the earth as the balloon soared. Based on the lessons learned from the first flight, the group has improved its payload container, added the capability for night launches (for high-altitude sky photography) and streamlined the hardware it is sending up into space. Through it all, the G1 phone has remained a constant. “No one is brave enough to try phones beyond the G1,” says Habryn. “But the truth is the G1 is what we have and is working well for us in these flights.” Photo: A photo shot by the Google G1 phone when up in the air. Photo courtesy Mikolaj Habryn, Andrew Gerrand, Christie Dudley

Motorola Phone Takes Flight Launching a gadget into space doesn’t have to be expensive. A group of MIT students launched a digital camera high into the sky on a budget that would easily classify as beer money: $150. Instead of rockets and expensive control systems, they used a weather balloon with a Styrofoam beer cooler underneath. The group repurposed a Motorola i290 “Boost Mobile” prepaid phone as a GPS receiver. A Canon A470 camera bought used on Amazon.com was loaded with an open-source software to enable a feature that allowed the device to take pictures continuously. The team set the camera to take a picture every 5 seconds at 1/800 second shutter speed. With an 8-GB card, the camera chronicled the four-hour journey from launch to retrieval. Project Icarus, as it was called, saw the camera, phone and the balloon go up to 93,000 feet. Photo credit: Project Icarus

High-def Video from the Edge of Space Last year, a team of amateur engineers attached a Canon Vixio-HF camcorder to a hydrogen balloon and launched it into the air. The result was footage taken at 107,145 feet. The mission was dubbed BEAR-4, for Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio. The balloon had a flight time of 3 hours and 56 minutes. The camera landed via a parachute about 89 miles from the launch site. Overall, it recorded 4 hours and 22 minutes of high-definition video before it stopped -- 53 seconds after landing -- when the device's 32 GB of memory was full. “The only thing better would have been if the camera could have recorded for several minutes more to capture the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its Styrofoam container,” says the group on its website. Check out the stunning edited video footage from the Canon camera on board: <object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Lie0diOhfdg&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Lie0diOhfdg&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640"></embed></object> Photo credit: BEAR-4