The technology could one day be used for 'manipulating vehicles or aircraft on Mars.'
, a team of scientists figured out how to build a new laser that can form an optical tractor beam capable of manipulating objects at a distance.
"In previous studies, the light pulling force was too small to pull a macroscopical object," said research team member Lei Wang from QingDao University of Science and Technology in China, in"With our new approach, the light-pulling force has a much larger amplitude," he added. "In fact, it is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure used to drive a solar sail, which uses the momentum of photons to exert a small pushing force.
"Our technique provides a non-contact and long-distance pulling approach, which may be useful for various scientific experiments," Wang said in the statement.According to the researcher, it may prove especially useful in some unexpected places as well.
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