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A ROCKET so small it fits on your fingertip has been tested in the US. It鈥檚
hoped that the microrocket might someday carry miniature sensors into dangerous
places like war zones, or even the heart of a tornado鈥攁nd predict where
the twister will go next.

Made entirely of silicon, the microrocket can blast up to 50 metres into the
air, carrying with it a payload of tiny sensors each no bigger than a grain of
sand. Engineer Kris Pister and graduate students William Lindsay and Dana
Teasdale at the University of California, Berkeley, made their microrocket from
a silicon wafer using standard machinery for making microchips.

Just 2 millimetres across and 9 millimetres high, the rocket only carries
enough propellant for a few seconds of flight. It runs on ordinary rocket
propellant ignited with a hot wire, but its creators are considering new
pyrotechnic materials that will burn more slowly and allow longer flights.
鈥淐onceivably you could launch it from anywhere, including the palm of your
hand,鈥� says Lindsay.

The team envisions blasting hundreds of cheap, disposable microrockets into
war zones to detect chemical weapons. The sensors would detach from the rocket
and record data as they floated to Earth, beaming them back to a base
station.

The Berkeley team now want to build in chips that will let scores of
microrockets communicate with each other.