This is exactly what I was thinking about after the Curiosity launch. Space exploration desperately needs to iterate faster, and tiny satellites running commodity hardware/OS designs. Android seems perfect for this, considering how easy it would be to deploy updates as .apk files, develop USB peripherals, etc..
The article doesn't mention anything about radiation hardening, though. Are they just not worried about it, because the idea is to make the satellite as cheap as possible?
By the sounds of things, these are temporary satellites not supposed to last for very long, so the long-term aspects of radiation damage might not be such an issue.
The article doesn't mention anything about radiation hardening, though. Are they just not worried about it, because the idea is to make the satellite as cheap as possible?