Launching later this year as ride-alongs on military and NASA missions, two upgraded PhoneSats - cubesats built around the core electronics of consumer smartphones - are beginning to look more "sat" and less "phone." The two spacecraft, which excluding the salaries of the NASA engineers who conceived and built them cost around $10,000 apiece, have moved beyond the "smartphone-in-a-box" design that was the hallmark of their two earliest predecessors. "We don't have the screen and the case and all that other stuff that we had on PhoneSat 1.0," said Bruce Yost, manager of the Small Spacecraft Technology Program at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "We took just the guts of it out of the phone and repackaged it with some other sensors."
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