Sending strange objects to space for fun or for publicity isn't exactly new, but this time there's a certain logic to it. After all, what better place than Earth's orbit to squeeze a 108-megapixel camera? The folks at Xiaomi announced that in 2019 they launched a satellite equipped with one of their Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro smartphones, pointed it at Earth, and captured some images. Here are the results.
The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro is the next flagship smartphone the Beijing giant will launch in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Although this specific model is already available in China, Xiaomi decided to delay its international debut until March 27, and it will be accompanied by a "non-Pro" variant.
Its general specifications include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 octa-core SoC, with a staggered configuration of 2.84 GHz (1 core), 2.42 GHz (3 cores), and 1.8 GHz (4 cores). RAM goes up to 12 GB in the highest configuration, with up to 512 GB of storage. However, all the attention is on its camera, with an impressive 108 megapixels of resolution, and the ability to record 8K video (that is, 7680 x 4320) at 30 frames per second.
Now, the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro isn't the first smartphone to join the 108-megapixel party, but considering it's about to become Xiaomi's new flagship, and that it symbolizes the first ten years of this giant in the mobile market, the advertising folks made a curious decision: send a unit to space to photograph the Earth and unleash the full potential of that camera.
Xiaomi only said the launch took place in 2019, and according to Space.com, the smartphone was a luxury passenger on one of the Cubesats that reached Earth's orbit riding the Gaofen-7 mission in November of last year. The official images show us the Earth from an altitude of 495 kilometers, with the Cubesats orbiting at a speed of 7.8 kilometers per second.
Obviously, the priority of such a launch is to optimize the advertising factor for a phone that is expected to comfortably exceed 650 euros once it appears on shelves, but Xiaomi and the local company Spacety, responsible for the Cubesat, had to solve "more than 300 problems" in less than six months before declaring the smartphone "ready" for its space adventure.
Source: Space.com
