Google invades the space with Android!

Featured, Stuff — By Samer Marzouq on January 1, 2011 at 5:10 pm

This is pretty cool, the Nexus team at Google has sent seven payloads into near space, each equipped with a Nexus S, the idea was to collect to collect some data about the sensors in Nexus S – GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, and the astronauts were small Android robots!

The team found out that the GPS in Nexus S could function up to altitudes of about 60,000 ft. and would actually start working again on the balloon’s descent, in addition, the phone could withstand temperatures as low as -50˚C.

The phones were running a variety of apps including:
Google Maps for Mobile 5.0 (with offline map data)
Google Sky Map
Latitude
Custom sensor logging app