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Tiny flyers levitate on the Sun's heat alone
Design could help to probe the ‘ignorosphere’, a layer of ultra-thin air that has largely escaped exploration by balloons, aircraft and satellites.
One day, it might enable swarms of tiny, unpowered flying saucers and other devices with no moving parts to explore the highest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere ― near the edge of space ―using sunlight alone to remain aloft. The layers, which are made of aluminium oxide, are roughly 1,000 times thinner than a typical human hair and are connected by narrow filaments. Importantly, Schafer’s device includes a new feature: the two layers are perforated with holes that allow gas molecules to move from the cold and transparent side to the hot chromium side, creating lift that is similar to that created by a helicopter’s whirring rotor, says Igor Bargatin, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has pioneered work on similar devices.
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