After iPod and iPhone, NASA to send iPad to space?

BANGALORE, INDIA: It appears that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States has plans to send tablets to space soon.

The Apple iPad was recently flight certified, an article on Wired quoted Brian Rishikof, CEO of Odyssey Space Research, saying. "It would be a lot easier to have a single tablet, a single screen, to take with you to do procedures and science experiments instead of having a big laptop with you," NASA astronaut Dan Burbank said in March 2012.

Read the article here.

While the shuttle program ended in July, NASA still maintains a crew of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where they work on cutting-edge technologies like humanoid robots and how spacecrafts can perform autonomous refueling.

In June, NASA sent a pair of iPhone 4s up into orbit on the shuttle's last trip to the ISS to conduct experiments with some purpose-built apps. Notebook computers and even iPods have made the leap into orbit. And tablets should also be heading up in the near future, stated the article.

"We're attempting to show how a commercial product that millions of people use can function as spaceflight hardware," Rishikof had said in June 2011. His company designed a piece of iPhone software called SpaceLab that was used on the iPhones sent up into orbit on the space shuttle's final mission last summer. The goal was to see if these $500 devices could replace machines that cost 10 or 100 times as much.

Because of the low mass, if iPhones and iPads were substituted for larger, NASA-designed computer systems, NASA could save on development time and money.

But before they can be approved for space travel, gadgets have to go through a rigorous, generally two-year-long certification process to make sure they're appropriate for use on board the ISS.

©CIOL Bureau