{"id":245534,"date":"2026-10-17T01:28:59","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/this-lightsaber-beam-is-actually-a-working-radio-antenna"},"modified":"2026-10-17T01:28:59","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:28:59","slug":"this-lightsaber-beam-is-actually-a-working-radio-antenna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/this-lightsaber-beam-is-actually-a-working-radio-antenna","title":{"rendered":"This \u201cLightsaber\u201d Beam Is Actually a Working Radio Antenna"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-lightsaber-beam-is-actually-a-working-radio-antenna2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>A plasma antenna resembling a lightsaber has transmitted radio waves and could let future spacecraft retune and redirect their antennas by adjusting a laser.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Changing a radio antenna\u2019s length can be difficult in space exploration equipment, even though that dimension helps determine which frequencies it can transmit and receive. Researchers have now demonstrated a possible alternative by transmitting radio waves with an antenna made from a laser-generated column of plasma.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne of the questions we wanted to explore with this work was whether it would be possible to create plasma antennas using lasers, which would allow us to generate antennas at whatever length was needed,\u201d says Prya Darshni, corresponding author of the journal article describing the work and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. \u201cAnd we have now shown that it is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A plasma antenna resembling a lightsaber has transmitted radio waves and could let future spacecraft retune and redirect their antennas by adjusting a laser. Changing a radio antenna\u2019s length can be difficult in space exploration equipment, even though that dimension helps determine which frequencies it can transmit and receive. Researchers have now demonstrated a possible [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514,2008],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel","category-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}