Tiny but precise: Team creates compact device to help spaceships land safely on planets smu
"Every gram of a device makes a huge difference in how much fuel I will have to have on a spacecraft and how many other items I can include as payload on that spacecraft," said SMU's Volkan Ötügen, one of the creators of the optical microresonator.
A whispering gallery is an enclosed circular or elliptical area, like that found beneath an architectural dome, in which whispers made at one end of the dome can be heard clearly on the other side. At resonance, some of the light is either absorbed or escapes through the surface. So the light that comes out of the whispering gallery is dimmer than what went in.Recording that shift in the wavelength can be used to measure different metrics, including a spaceship's acceleration. Devices that use whispering gallery modes produce very precise results in spite of their small size.
Pockets of gas of varying density can also nudge the spacecraft off course as it descends and the spacecraft must safely decrease its speed to zero in a short time frame.
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