$2 Million NASA Power Beaming Challenge Heating Up 98
carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."
Re:Space elevator? (Score:5, Funny)
Helicopter Pilot (Score:5, Funny)
NASA: "We'd like you to hover for a few hours dangling a cable."
Pilot: "Boring!"
NASA: "Oh, and several teams will be shooting lasers in your direction."
Pilot: "Now you're talking!"
I'd like to know (Score:5, Funny)
what brave soul wants to pilot the test helicopter anchoring the top of the beanstalk, while engineers of varying degrees of competence are aiming powerful directed energy beams at an object suspended a short distance below them.
"Do not glance outside of cockpit with remaining eye."
Re:Space elevator? (Score:3, Funny)
Last I heard there were bigger problems with space elevators than the energy required to get up there.
A circular geosynchronous orbit in the plane of the Earth's equator has a radius of approximately 42,164 km (from the center of the Earth). A satellite in such an orbit is at an altitude of approximately 35,786 km above mean sea level.
Yeah. Attacks by Vermicious Knids
Re:Microwave instead of visible energy (Score:1, Funny)
The lasers are actually infrared and invisible. Ours is 808nm and is very slightly visible to some as a violet glow. For this use lasers are easier to work with then microwaves as they have a much smaller divergence so the transmitter can be much much smaller. For beaming microwaves over these distance you end up with a transmitter that does a fair imitation of a radio telescope.
But at those distances, how can you possibly get the sharks to hold still enough to keep the beam focused?
Moron.
Re:Space elevator? (Score:4, Funny)