It was Ridley Scott’s film Alien that gave us the now legendary tagline: In space no one can hear you scream. Now, a Cambridge student society will use the technology in your pocket to find out if this is really the case.
Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) will be uploading videos of people screaming into a specially developed smartphone app, housed on a Google Android phone that will be shot into space as part of a satellite payload in early December. Once in orbit, the phone will play the screams at full volume, while at the same time recording audio.
The phone will then relay back to Earth pictures of each ‘scream’ video playing against the spectacular view from the phone’s inbuilt camera, along with a sound file that may or may not contain the scream captured in the vacuum of space, although the members of CUSF are not holding their collective breath.
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Image: Image taken in stratosphere using Android phone, from previous CUSF project ‘Squirrel 3’ which used smartphone to pilot high-altitude balloon
Credit: CUSF
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Your chance to ‘scream in space’ using smartphone technology
26 October 2012
Cambridge students will be loading human screams onto a smartphone that will be blasted into outer space later this year. The public are invited to submit their screams, which will be emitted while in orbit at the same time as the phone records - to test if it’s possible to capture the sound of screaming in space.