Smartphones have a new area to explore: They will now take NASA astronaut robots from 2006 tech to the future of space travel. All this is under the Google's experiment Project Tango, which is all set to launch on July 11.

The word given to such Android is called SPHERES - Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites. The experts from NASA believe that someday smartphones would do all the typical works of the astronauts.

For this reality experiment project, SPHERES project manager Chris Provencher and his team brought phones from Best Buy and joined them with their soccer ball size robots. For adding the sophistication part in this whole setup Project Tango was taken up.

As reported on the website the Project Tango team said they want developers who can help test the tech and push boundaries as their aim is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.

Adding on to this, NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced that they will be using Google's smartphones with 3D sensing capabilities to run the ball-shaped robots on International space station. All this is part of the "Project Tango initiative".

The long-term aim of the whole setup is to eventually to enable the SPHERES to handle the everyday chores the astronauts currently complete themselves. The smartphones being used for this project have features like an infrared depth sensor and a motion-sensing camera.

Provencher concluded by saying, "We wanted to add communication, a camera, increase the processing capability, accelerometers and other sensors. We realized the answer was in our hands. Let's just use smartphones".