NASA Teams Up With Hoverboard Company to Build a Magnetic "Tractor Beam"
NASA Teams Up With Hoverboard Company to Build a Magnetic
"Tractor Beam"
By Maddie Stone Filed to: ARX PAX 9/02/15 8:00am
When Arx Pax unveiled its “hoverboard” last year, we had
a hunch that this was but the first demonstration of the company’s new magnetic
field technology. Why was Arx Pax really messing around with magnets? For one,
to build a tractor beam.
That’s right: Today, Arx Pax is announcing a new
partnership with NASA, which wants to use hover engine technology to capture
and manipulate micro-satellites. In other words, NASA and Arx Pax are going to
try to create a magnetic tractor beam. A small one.
“NASA realized that this is a fundamental tool,” Arx Pax
founder and CFO Greg Henderson told Gizmodo over the phone. “What we’re
providing NASA is a way of manipulating objects in space without touching
them.”
But let’s back up a quick sec. For those who don’t remember,
Arx Pax made its debut with the unveiling of the Hendo Hoverboard in 2014. That
device—yes, it can indeed hover off the ground—was the first application of the
company’s patent-pending Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) technology.
The principle behind the board is simple: A ‘hover
engine’ generates swirls of electricity in a conductive surface to produce a
concentrated magnetic field. That magnetic field induces an opposing field in a
conductive material below—and voila, liftoff. (It’s really not that easy,
companies have been trying and failing to do this for years.)
The Hendo Hoverboard was on some levels a success, but it
was no Back to the Future. The thing only worked on a special metallic surface,
it made loud, screechy noises, and its battery life was pretty bad. But it was
clear that the device was really just a proof-of-concept, and that Arx Pax had
bigger plans in mind for MFA—for instance, levitating houses to protect them
from earthquake damage, or using magnetic fields to attract satellites to one
another.
NASA Teams Up With Hoverboard Company to Build a Magnetic
"Tractor Beam"
A CubeSat built at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Image
Credit: NASA Ames
In a statement issued today, Arx Pax says it’ll be
working with NASA “to design a device with the ability to attract one object to
another from a distance.” At this stage, the focus will be on linking up CubeSats
— those lightweight, 10 by 10 cm satellites that NASA and other researchers are
using to monitor the Earth, and that we may eventually deploy to explore
distant worlds.
“CubeSats are in close proximity already,” Henderson
says. “We’re trying to figure out how do you link them together, connect them,
and move them around relative to one another.”
Whether we’re studying our planet’s climate or exploring
the surface of an asteroid, there are obvious benefits to a coordinated team of
satellites. But we shouldn’t get too excited just yet, because details of the
project are very sparse—we don’t, for instance, know how Arx Pax and NASA are
hoping to power said “tractor beam,” or what sorts of ranges we might be able
to achieve. Still, it seems like a worthy project, and hey, if we ever hope to
build epic, tractor-beam wielding, galaxy-trotting spaceships, we’ve gotta
start somewhere.
http://gizmodo.com/nasa-teams-up-with-hoverboard-company-to-build-a-magnet-1728136893
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