Scientists working for NASA continue inventing strange and unusual mechanisms. The device I want to describe this week is called mesicopter. The name resembles the word "helicopter" and in fact a mesicopter is a kind of helicopter, but a very small one. The prefix "mesi" implies a design of intermediate scale, between microscopic systems and more conventionally-sized devices. Hence the meso-scale systems are the systems on the scale of one to ten centimeters.
Take a look at the photo, the mesicopter is no exclusion. It is much smaller than any helicopter ever created, but at the same time it is still visible with the naked eye, so it exactly fits into the size range. Each rotor of this mesicopter is only 1.5 cm in diameter and the total weight of the whole device is 3 g. The mesicopter pictured below can lift itself and fly for 30 minutes. With reduced endurance the device would be capable of lifting a 1 g payload. I took this information from a very outdated PDF file, so I think more advanced mesicopters with increased endurance and payload capability are available now.
The main goal of the mesicopters will be collecting various data using very small imaging sensors (CCD and CMOS), MEMS temperature and pressure sensors, and other miniature science payloads currently under development. Then this data will be transmitted to the base using an optical communication system. This was the only possible choice. When using radio frequencies the antenna size is constrained by t