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REAL LIFE IMITATES SCIENCE FICTION: TRACTOR BEAMS

by Hazed

In science fiction, tractor beams are commonly used to secure cargo to spaceships, and to grapple with enemy ships to stop them escaping. In real life, they should be able to do similar things - but only on a microscopic level.

NASA has just awarded a $100,000 grant to a team at the Goddard Space Flight Center so they can research tractor beams. The goal is to come up with a way to use lasers to collect samples without the need for touch, thereby avoiding contamination of the collected material.

The investigators will look at three different possible methods to do this:

• Optical tweezers - two counter-propagating beams of light. This is already in use in a limited way, but it has the drawback that it needs at atmosphere to work in, so won't be suitable for many of the missions NASA plans.
• Optical solenoid beams which pull particles towards the light source using electromagnetic effects. The good news is that this one will work in a vacuum.
• Bessel beams to induce electrical or magnetic beams within particulates, which can then be used to propel them. This is so far entirely theoretical.

"Though a mainstay in science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, laser-based trapping isn't fanciful or beyond current technological know-how," Principal Investigator Paul Stysley said. "The original thought was that we could use tractor beams for cleaning up orbital debris, but to pull something that huge would be almost impossible - at least now. That's when it bubbled up that perhaps we could use the same approach for sample collection."

"We want to make sure we thoroughly understand these methods," team member Barry Coyle said. "We have hope that one of these will work for our purposes. We're at the starting gate on this. This is a new application that no one has claimed yet."

Incidentally, those who remember the first incarnation of Fed (what we now call classic Fed) will remember that you could buy tractor beams for your ship. They were intended as part of ship fighting but could never actually be used. Maybe they would only move a spaceship one molecule at a time!

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/nasa_funding_tractor_beam_research/

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