Teleportation? Beam me up Scotty! Not quite there yet, but would you settle for a tractor beam?

Well, Ok - we're not quite there yet with teleportation, but tractor beam technology might be making some advancements in the very near future.

As we've all seen in Star Trek, tractor beams capture and can move objects using laser light.

Paul Stysley is one of three NASA scientists who just recently were awarded funding to study methods for capturing particles and transporting them using a laser light to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

Goddard laser experts (from left to right)
Barry Coyle, Paul Stysley, and Demetrios Poulios
have won NASA funding to study advanced technologies
for collecting extraterrestrial particle samples.
(Photo Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Debora McCallum)

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.”

The scientists have identified three different approaches for transporting particles, as well as single molecules, viruses, ribonucleic acid, and fully functioning cells, using the power of light. Take a look at the posted article to see what the three different approaches are.. 


http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/tractor-beam.html

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/nasa-aiming-to-make-tractor-beams-a-reality/2952?tag=mantle_skin;content