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Most Innovative United Kingdom

Geoff Hughes Phil Cross Ben Nunney

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Phones home - from Space !

Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft (ASTRA) Windows Phone 7 boldly goes where no smartphone has traveled before - The stratosphere! WP7, Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight, .NET, Windows Azure, Bing maps, WorldWide Telescope. BizSpark DreamSpark.

The phone reached a Maximum of 18,237 meters during its 1h 16 min flight it also managed to hit a top speed of 90mph.

Lars Lindstedt Lee Stott

• WP7 launched into stratosphere to test the capabilities of mobile computing platform in capturing, analysing, and transmitting location data from unmanned vehicles in the upper atmosphere.

• "hunter mode," logger application allowed ASTRA staff on the ground to track the payload during its flight, thus enabling its recovery. Bing Maps to display the location of the balloon payload, the hunter's phone, the locations of the other hunters, as well as the predicted landing location, which was constantly re-computed in the cloud by Windows Azure .

• Why use a phone to do this? "10 years ago, using a box with a 1GHz processor wouldn't have come in under 10kg in weight," said research fellow Steven Johnston. The need to reduce the "payload" on the balloon is what made a smartphone appealing, but why Windows Phone 7 rather than, say, an iPhone or Android handset?

• "We looked at iPhone, but objective C is just not for me, on a personal level," says Johnston. "I love my Visual Studio and do a lot of .Net development, so I didn't need to learn any new skills for this. The key thing is that we're not doing all the calculations on the phone itself: Azure comes in for the serious backend processing."

• The ASTRA 7 reached a maximum altitude of 70,000 feet during a flight of 1 hour 16 minutes, soaring deep into the stratosphere, with the temperature dropping to -58 C. The maximum speed reached by ASTRA 7 was approximately 90 miles per hour, as the balloon traversed the jet stream. "We are excited that this constitutes a unique opportunity to collect important data that will give new insight into how the upper atmosphere affects Earth's climate and environment, using affordable technology.“Dr. András Sóbester

• http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/da17789f-7914-4131-b7cb-91937be3d20a Microsoft NEXT Video winner ! Watch the launch !