What grows in space, is about the size of a baseball and is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Jacques Guigne is waiting to find out.
The research scientist and founder of Guigne International in Newfoundland owns a device, now aboard the International Space Station, that uses beams of sound to suspend materials for processing.
"The beams of sound energy work like invisible fingers that gently push the floating sample into the center of the container so that it doesn't touch the walls," explained Guigne.
Guigne told Discovery News the fingers of sound "are very intelligent in terms of how they are manipulated."
The primary advantage of using sound beams to hold materials in space is so that they can be processed cleanly, without any contamination from a container.
"With no gravity and nothing touching the walls (of a container) you can have a very pure structure. Hence, it's of great value," said Guigne, who pegs the price of a space-formed sample in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of material produced.
Those used for semiconductors, for example, would be among the most valuable, he added.
"If you have a steady base of manufacturing then you can see a good return," Guigne said.
Sound-suspended samples can be grown to relatively large sizes in space, about the diameter of a golf ball or baseball, which dwarfs the millimeter-sized materials previously produced in microgravity.
A ball of pure glass, for example, can be sliced and sold for a variety of commercial and manufacturing uses, though Guigne says at this point he considers his proprietary and patented technology to be a test bed.
discovery.com
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