Graphene is so awesome, it could get a spacecraft to fly on starlight instead of fuel, or that’s what a new study seems to theorize at least. Author Jules Verne wrote about such a feat being achievable in his 1865 science fiction novel ‘From the Earth to the Moon’. And it looks like mankind may be a step closer to that dream coming to life.
It’s not like no one’s working on viable spacecraft designs propelled by starlight. NASA has been toying with the idea and may continue to do so even if its Sunjammer solar sail mission was pulled on 2014. The latest revelation about graphene being a worthy candidate for consideration in fuel-free space exploration vehicles, comes from researchers based in Nankai University in China.
It has already been proven that objects at the microscopic scale including atoms, molecules, viruses, nanoscopic particles and so on, can be trapped, levitated, pulled or pushed by using beams of light correctly. The team at Nankai managed to magnetically levitate a millimeter-sized graphite disk and thus cause motion and rotation by means of photoirradiation. But the problem of applying the same on a macroscopic spatial scale has to be resolved before we have spaceships flying on starlight.
In other words, scientists will have a tough job of getting large objects using graphene (such as spacecrafts) to soar even if it’s possible in theory. Re-stacking graphene sheets diminishes the intrinsic properties of this allotrope of carbon, including but not restricted to its electronic, photonic and mechanical aspects. In their latest paper on the subject, the Nankai researchers have furthered the idea of light-induced propulsion and rotation of bulk graphene sponge material.
The discovery was quite accidental and occurred when the team was cutting a graphene sponge by laser. The same experiment was then executed in a vacuum, only to lead to the conclusion that the graphene absorbed laser energy to create a charge of electrons, before eventually releasing the extra electrons and thus being propelled. Heat and combustion were ruled to be out of the picture here since there was no evidence to prove either scenario. Space has light and it has vacuum.
This makes it the perfect environment for enabling fuel-free spacecrafts built using graphene to fly merely on starlight.