NASA Researching "Tractor Beam" Technology

NASA would like to have a "Tractor Beam". The problem is that no one has of yet ever built a tractor beam or even agreed on what constitutes a tractor beam. However a team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md have been experimenting with laser light to pick up and move particles into testing instrumentation which in the future might be mounted on spacecraft or rovers. The lasers would be much like a vacuum cleaner, focusing and transporting small particles to awaiting sensors. Initially it was thought that this tech would be used to clean up orbital debris, however the lasers are no where near powerful enough to move anything greater than near sub microscopic particles. In the film below, NASA demonstrates how they feel the system might operate in the future.

Real Life Tractor Beams!

Ok, before you start to fantasize about Star Trek gleaming beams able to pull huge ships from even more amazing distances, we are talking about something on a much smaller scale. Like microscopic small....at least until recently.

From the article:

• Researchers from the Australian National University have announced that they have built a device that can move small particles a meter and a half using only the power of light.

But lets put this in perspective. Up until recently, researchers could only move tiny particles over minuscule distances. By comparison, the power of A.N.U.'s device is thousands of times more powerful.

And how they accomplish this feat is in itself awe inspiring itself! A.N.U. starts with a hollow laser beam. Yes I said hollow. This hollow beam is focused around a glass bead. As the bead drifts closer to the walls of the laser, heat is produced forcing the bead back towards the center. The air in the darker center is also heated by the laser forcing the bead down the center of the beam. To force the bead back in the other direction, the team simply focuses another laser into the dark center in front of the bead, controlling it's x y and z axis and over much larger distances!

Read complete physorg article here