Hoverboard creators partner with NASA to develop tractor beam

Arx Pax has entered into a Space Act Agreement with NASA to help create a tractor beam.

You may remember hearing about Arx Pax when they decided tokickstart a project for its Hendo Hoverboard. But the company doesn’t seem content in just fulfilling Earthly dreams of riding a hoverboard. Its patent-pending Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) could be engineered to help realign satellites.

The MFA is able to manipulate and move magnetic fields to generate an eddy current effect. Arx Pax believes it can apply this technology to help NASA move cubesats or micro-satellites—not much bigger than a box of cereal. These cubesats are typically used in low Earth orbit with missions to test and research new technologies on a smaller scale, observe the Earth from space, or conduct atmospheric research–there are a number of possibilities.

Here’s a great video explaining the history of cubesats and how they’re used today:

Comparing the MFA technology to Star Trek’s tractor beams, which could capture and move whole ships, may be a bit of an exaggeration. NASA and Arx Pax merely plan on nudging these cubesats into position.

“We’re talking on the scale of centimeters,” Greg Henderson, founder of Arx Pax explained in an interview. However, in space, small pushes can have big effects.

Over the next couple of years, Arx Pax says it will work with NASA on migrating the MFA technology to a device that will be able to realign these cubesats. The hope is this new technology will increase the hang time of these satellites before they fall to Earth, furthering the potential data collected in exploratory and research-based missions.