Technology + Space Fact of the Day

STS-135, the final space shuttle mission that lifted off successfully yesterday, is carrying an iPhone 4 into space for the first time. The astronauts will use the iPhone to assess the phone’s abilities to navigate in space. The iPhone 4 has a three-axis gyroscope, and three accelerometers, which means that it has more ways to sense where it is than the Apollo Command Module which guided men to the moon from 1969 to 1972. If the experiment shows that the phone’s internal sensors are accurate enough, an iPhone could theoretically be used to guide a spaceship. The Apollo Guidance Computer was developed for $350 million. This works out to be around $20 million dollars per computer. Now, forty years later, similar technology is included in a $200 phone.