While hit sci-fi movies and TV shows have seen most of their
future-tech become reality in the past few decades, one piece of
technology that has yet to really see the light of day is
tractor beams.That could all be about to change, though. NASA is
now funding a study to investigate if tractor beam technology
can be used to gather samples on future space missions.
Potentially this would allow for much fewer moving parts on
sample collecting probes, which makes for far fewer problems: at
least that's the theory. There have been several tractor beam
technologies discussed in previous years, as there is some
contention about how to go about it. However, they all utilise
the other staple of sci-fi dreams, lasers. It's three of these
laser based tractor beams that NASA is investigating with their
study, putting $100,000 into it. The first method has a major
drawback in that it requires an atmosphere, making it useless on
outcrops like our own moon. Contary to everything we learned in
Ghostbusters, it works by cros