Popular Mechanics by Jackie Appel 6/6/2023
• Scientists are working on bringing a tractor beam from science fiction to reality.
• The researchers are planning to use beams of electrons to create opposite charges and attract object to the beam for manipulation.
• The goal is to find a safe and effective way to pare down the ever-growing field of space junk orbiting our planet.
The problem with space debris, though, is that it’s very hard to collect and remove for proper disposal. You can’t just send a little robot up into space to scoop up our refuse and send it back down—because you can’t really just grab space junk. It’s most often moving very fast, and it’s very hard to predict exactly how it’s moving so you can be ready to catch it. There’s unfortunately a good chance that whatever you send to physically grab the junk is going to get hit and become even more junk itself.
So, enter the tractor beam. If you can just shoot a beam at something to grab it, most of that danger gets avoided. The team working on this technology is looking to create an “electron beam,” which would basically work like a very strong version of static electricity.
“We’re creating an attractive or repulsive electrostatic force,” Hanspeter Schaub, a researcher and leader of this project, said in a news release. “It’s similar to the tractor beam you see in Star Trek, although not nearly as powerful.”
In order to test its tech, the team has been working with a device called Electrostatic Charging Laboratory for Interactions between Plasma and Spacecraft (ECLIPS). It’s basically a small chamber that mimics, in miniature, the regions of space around our planet that is most full of space debris.
More:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a44105642/scientists-building-real-tractor-beam/
