How Can Nanotechnology Be Used To Discover Other Planets?

Rianna Kalra
3 min readSep 7, 2020

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What is Nanotechnology? Nanotechnology is the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers, especially the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules. In short, it’s a technology that operates at the nanoscale. One nanometer (nm) is measured at one billionth (10–9) of a meter, and the convention is to assign the term “nanotechnology” to technology that operates on a scale of 1 to 100 nm.

What is Nanotechnology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKh4cwAygPM&feature=emb_title

Propulsion is one of the most significant challenges to developing fast and convenient space travel. Scientists can use solar sails that use a lot of nanotechnologies. Solar sails have a very large surface area that is extremely reflective, but solar sails are also extremely thin and there isn’t too much weight either. Materials engineered using nanotechnology can satisfy these requirements. The nanomaterial and nanotechnology can identify and fix any damage that might have happened to the solar sails during takeoff and travel. Rockets and other ways of space travel require lots of fuel, where as using nanotech on solar sails, no fuel would be required and solar sails will also travel very quickly.

Exploring the surface of a distant planet using swarms of tiny nanorobots is another way nanotechnology can be useful. A problem with exploring lands and planets is that there is a very big amount of land with a small group of people. Identifying and discovering the whole land is very hard and next to impossible. Nanotechnology works conveniently, fast and it is small, so this is when nanotech comes in very handy. If a huge amount of tiny nanobots are capable of travelling across the planet’s surface, or drifting on wind and through the atmosphere, to survey large swaths of a planet quickly, then that would be way more efficient and better than human surveying the land. Also, nanobots would be way more superior and finer at discovering and learning the features of the land then human. the advanced technology of nanobots could possibly even handle or manage the thick, or gaseous atmosphere, where as it is harder for human.

Nanotechnology can be very useful in including layers of bio-nano robots in spacesuits. The outer layer of bio-nano robots would respond to damages to the spacesuit. An inner layer of bio-nano robots could respond if the astronaut was in trouble. With Nanotechnology, those spacesuits would also be much more flexible, which will make it easier for the astronauts to move around the planetary surfaces.

Nanotechnology is a very important and significant technology in the AI (artificial intelligence) area. It has contributed to many discoveries including the invention of scanning the tunnelling microscope in the 1980s by IBM Zurich scientists and then the atomic force microscope. Nanotechnology can be very helpful to discover other planets, but it can also be helpful in many other areas such as disease, cancer, diagnostic equipment and improvements in manufacturing. I hope that everyone got to learn about a new topic today, and gain more interest in Nanotechnology.

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Rianna Kalra

15 y/o student @ TKS Innovate | nanotech & gene editing enthusiast | huge bollywood fan