• Question: Will there be a space phone!

    Asked by Lizzy Charles to Paul M - Engineering Team, Abbie on 9 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 9 Jan 2020:

      I’m not sure quite what you mean here – but there are already ways that we communicate with our spacecraft out in space – so in a way you could call this a “phone”.

      We can send data but the rate is quite low- so if you wanted a voice or especially video call it would be quite poor audio/image quality – you can see that if you ever see live video chats with the International Space Station, for example, and they’re a lot closer than Mars is!

      It’s easier to record stuff and send it, then once it is received, to record something and send it back. Mars is such a long way away that depending on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits it takes between 4 and 24 minutes for light (or radiowaves, that we use to communicate with) to pass between them. that means if you said something you’d have to wait 4-24 minutes for the person on Mars to hear it, and then once they replied, another 4 minutes for that to get back to you. So it could be quite a long conversation! >.<

Comments

  • Photo: Paul

    Paul commented on :

    We are always looking for ways to make it easier to talk to people in space. Right now, we are looking at the possibility of a satellite that helps people and robots on the moon to talk to earth.

  • Photo: AmauriBoi123

    AmauriBoi123 commented on :

    I you was to use a mobile device in space, would it break or would it survive?

  • Photo: Abbie

    Abbie commented on :

    Mobile phones might work for a while in space – there was even a tiny satellite called a cubesat (30 x 10 x 10cm) that my friend Chris from the University of Surrey led the project for, which used a normal mobile phone as the on-board computer and camera.
    video: https://youtu.be/LEDMTwlx_zo
    website: https://amsat-uk.org/satellites/tlm/strand-1/

    The problem is normally radiation in space, which would be constantly hitting the phone, and could stop it working at any time. So it might break immediately, or it might work for a few days fine but then break – you just can’t tell. All electronics for long-term use in space has to be specially designed and built to be resistant to radiation damage in a way that normal electronics for use on Earth just isn’t.