Use low-cost methods to solve problems that could only be solved with high prices.

Edit | Shi Yaqiong

What would be the effect of shooting the earth with a mobile phone in space? At the press conference of the Xiaomi 10 / Mi 10 pro series mobile phones in the afternoon of February 13, Lei Jun gave the answer.

In the afternoon of February 13, in addition to the regular introduction of Xiaomi 10 / Mi 10 Pro, photos of the Earth taken in space with the Xiaomi 10 Pro mobile phone camera appeared on the large screen behind Lei Jun.

Lei Jun said that the set of photos originated from a “crazy idea”. After the development of the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro with a rear main camera of 100 million pixels, the Xiaomi team decided to launch the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro into space and “take a picture looking back at the earth and see what the earth looks like at 100 million pixels”. The China Commercial Aerospace Corporation Tianyi Research Institute has become a partner of Xiaomi. In this cooperation, Tianyi carried Xiaomi’s camera as a payload on the independently developed Xiaoxiang-1 08 star, and in November 2019 Successful launch into orbit on the 3rd.

During the three-month shooting mission, a photo in Lei Jun’s mouth eventually became a group of photos. At the press conference, Lei Jun showed the surface of the earth captured with the Xiaomi 10 Pro camera, and emotionally described this image as “a blue crystal ball”. In the photo display of the African continent, Lei Jun continuously enlarged the photos to find details such as Mount Koussi and Olonga Crater in the picture for the audience. In the information released by the Tianyi Institute, you can also see photos of the Hormuz Strait, irrigated agriculture in southern Egypt, and other places.

Although displaying these photos of the earth has earned enough attention, in fact, getting consumer-grade mobile phone modules and mobile phone cameras into space is not easy. First, the electronic device grade can be divided into consumer grade / commercial grade, industrial grade / automotive grade, military grade, and aerospace grade. Mobile phones are at the consumer level. Products assembled with this type of electronic devices have to withstand the test of temperature changes and space irradiation in the environment where the aerospace-grade devices used to be. Lei Jun mentioned that for this shooting, the Xiaomi camera has experienced extreme high and low temperature changes from -30 ° C to 70 ° C. And space radiation refers to radiation from charged particles in space . These charged particles have a damaging effect on the human body, materials and components, which may lead to a reduction of the battery array life, and may also cause sensors and vision. The detector generates problems such as false background noise.

In addition, Lei Jun also mentioned that Xiaomi ’s mobile phone camera will also be subject to vibration when it “breaks through the atmosphere”. This is a series of shocks caused by mobile phone devices when launching satellites with rockets. By comparison, the total vibration magnitude of road transportation is 0.1g ~ 0.2g, and the mechanical magnitude of the device carried by the satellite during the rocket launch will often reach 10g ~ 15g, which is 10 times of that of highway.About 0 times. Therefore, Lei Jun believes that the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro camera has experienced a lot of hard work in this task, and it is not an exaggeration.

So, why is Tianyi Research Institute participating in this project?

According to the data, Tianyi Research Institute established in 2016 is one of the first commercial aerospace companies in China, focusing on the development of aerospace systems and payloads for the commercial market. By the end of 2019, the company had completed nine space missions and successfully launched 15 satellites. And this 15th satellite is the Xiaoxiang No. 08 star carried by the Xiaomi camera.

In previous interviews, Yang Feng has mentioned many times that “making space as easy as possible” is the goal and vision of Tianyi. In previous attempts at space-borne applications of some consumer and industrial devices, Tianyi found that many consumer and industrial devices today are more reliable than aerospace devices in the 1970s and 1980s. So, “When we learned that Xiaomi had put a high-resolution image sensor that was only available in the aerospace field into the camera of a mobile phone, we actively contacted Xiaomi.” Tianyi said.

After the press conference, Yang Feng was symmetrical, and the follow-up results achieved by this cooperation have also reached expectations. According to the data provided by Tianyi, within a few hours from the press conference to 20 o’clock that night, the wallpaper downloads of this photo have approached 1 million. But he thinks that the significance of this matter may be to broaden the direction for future space applications.

First of all, Tianyi’s cooperation with Xiaomi is worthy of acquiring the earth image in a cost-effective manner. In the past, scientists have relied on larger satellites in order to obtain a large number of Earth images. For example, the United States Landsat8 Earth Remote Sensing Satellite, launched on February 11, 2013, has contributed greatly to Earth remote sensing observations worldwide Share. However, this satellite has a weight of 2071 kilograms without fuel, and a single star cost of one billion US dollars. The 6U cubic star on the Xiaomi 10 Pro camera this time is only the size of a briefcase (1U is a unit of volume, 10 * 10 * 10cm, and can be expanded to “2U”, “3U” or even “12U”) , The price is correspondingly lower than the former.

As for the picture quality, according to Yang Feng, some professional remote sensing application units were surprised at the quality of the images taken by the mobile phone camera. Although the resolution of these pictures is limited by the field angle of the mobile phone lens, the coverage of a single image has reached about 720 * 540 kilometers (one of the main loads carried by Landsat8 is the optical camera for ground imaging, which The resolution is 30 meters, which is almost double the resolution of Xiaomi’s 60 meters to the ground this time, but the coverage width is only 1/4 of that of Xiaomi phones). If there is a large number ofOrbital cameras of the same type acquire multi-angle, multi-resolution, multi-mode, high-frequency images of the earth, and finally synthesize trillion-pixel-level panoramic images of the earth. In the future, they may be used in meteorological observation, environmental warning, marine science, glacial polar regions, and even Applications in many areas such as financial analysis.

A low-cost data acquisition method. The cooperation between Xiaomi and Tianyi provided a commercialization path for commercial aerospace companies. Reducing costs is especially important for commercial aerospace. Before SpaceX tried to reduce costs through commercialization, there were very few customers who could afford aerospace services, which also led to fewer players in the aerospace industry, or even a monopoly. For Chinese commercial space players, low prices are also key. Because only a reduction in price can allow more people to participate across the threshold and bring commercial customers to commercial aerospace companies. Cooperation such as using mobile phone cameras to carry CubeStar is also a current attempt by Chinese commercial aerospace companies.

For Tianyi, the significance of this event is also to set a benchmark case, which can help it attract more similar customers. And the commercial value of this matter is not only to charge partners such as Xiaomi, but also to explore in the consumer field (similar to DJI aerial photography) and professional fields (such as the data services for different industries mentioned above), Because the cost of getting the data is very low, Tianyi can also sell the data at a very low price, gaining many users and good profit margins.