Origami Plane to Fly From the Int. Space Station 217
SK writes "The University of Tokyo and the Japan folded paper (origami) plane society hopes to fly a paper airplane from the International Space Station to Earth. The plane will be 30-40cm long and weigh about 30 grams. A University of Tokyo research group has successfully designed a special paper plane model that was able to withstand a Mach 7 high velocity stream for 10 seconds. The experimental plane was about one-fifth the size and withstood temperatures as high as 300C without burning up." Unfortunately for most of us reading this, the original source is all in japanese.
Hey guys! (Score:5, Funny)
"Ha, that's sweet! You know what we should do with it?"
*Airlock Sounds*
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flip? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:flip? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:flip? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that the speed of sound changes with the properties of the air through which an object is travelling. The absolute speed of an object (i.e. in m/s) corresponding to a high Mach number deep in our atmosphere (say in the troposphere or stratosphere) would actually be much, much slower than the speed of sound in the mid-thermosphere (where the ISS is located).
Its a similar reason to why de-orbiting objects can travel faster than terminal velocity; they accelerated to that speed before the air resistance built up.
Aikon-
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Re:flip? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Orbital mechanics, not magic... (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm chargin' mah lazer! (Score:4, Funny)
On the contrary... (Score:5, Funny)
Stage two involves plasma thrusters and a "paper moon" orbiter. When you can afford to launch 14 million orbital vehicles, one of them is bound to accomplish the job. Besides, what better building material to use if you want to send a message to aliens in other galaxies?
Translated (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Translated (Score:5, Funny)
uh, Fascinating!
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8 centimeters in length experiment, the space shuttle heat-resistant form of folded paper airplane use by the process. Tokyo campus Ookashiwa (Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture), a super high-speed wind tunnel tests of the high-speed stream of Mach 7 in the heat resistance and strength to find out.
When the space shuttle and other spacecraft will return to the speed of Mach 20, and the friction in the air and high temperatures for the heat-resistant surface is a special twist. Paper airplane is so light, slowing down from the thin air, landing in slow. Coming back without burnout might be.
Suzuki professor at Tokyo University (aerospace engineering) is a "message of peace from the space station to skip it. Land in the world where you do not know the fairy who could deliver" a dream said.
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Hey! I saw that movie, too!
It wasn't that great.
Re:Translated (Score:5, Informative)
In order to make a paper airplane that can fall back to Earth from a space station, the Japan Origami Paper Airplane Group and Tokyo University have been brought together. Using the University's wind tunnel, testing was performed on the 17th.
In the experiment an 8 cm long paper airplane, folded into the shape of the space shuttle, was made of material that had been treated for heat resistance. It was tested for heat resistance and strength in a Mach 7 airflow generated by the ultra high speed wind tunnel located at Todai's Kashiwa Campus (Kashiwa City, Chiba Prefecture).
Space vehicles such as the Space Shuttle can reach speeds of Mach 20 on reentry and due to the high temperatures caused friction with the atomosphere, their surfaces require special heat resistance devices. Because of the low weight of the paper airplane, it will begin deceleration from where the atmosphere is thin and be able to land slowly. It is said that it may be able to return to Earth without burning up.
Shinji Suzuki, professor of aerospace engineering at Tokyo University, shared his dream. "I want to fly it from the Space Station with a message of peace. I don't know where in the world it will land, but hopefully the person who finds it report it."
Re:Click on the "English" button (Score:4, Insightful)
>Land in the world where you do not know the fairy who could deliver" a dream said.
Milton couldn't have said it better.
origami book (Score:4, Funny)
English language link (Score:5, Informative)
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080118p2a00m0na025000c.html [mainichi.jp]
More likely ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More likely ... (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt it. The Americans have always had a bit of a blind spot for incoming Japanese planes.
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why not metal foil? (Score:5, Interesting)
If purists insist on paper, the one could deposit a thin foil veneer on the leading edges or deposit a trace-work of metal to create a reflector of radar waves (extra credit for adding an RFID chip to the mix).
Re:why not metal foil? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point isn't what happens to the plane in ACTUAL freefall, the point is to do the materials and aerodynamics studies on the ground. Why not use foil? Because they have already tested foil in space and know quite a bit about it. Whether foil would work or not is not what this particular group wants to study. They haven't tested this kind of treated paper. Maybe there are some surprising benefits in heat-treated papers that could change the way we do satellites.
Of course, the final "experiment" is more like playing golf on the moon, if they even bother to do it at all. It's just a part of joie de vivre, which I think is sorely lacking in western society today. Stop griping needlessly. They won't spend a billion dollars to take a piece of scrap paper to space and chuck it into the big blue swirly spherical rubbish heap. However, thanks to this outlandish conversation-starter concept, they might be allowed to spend a significantly smaller budget on traditional material and aerodynamic science.
joie de vivre + useful asteroid mining tech (Score:2)
I'd bet that foil airplanes might be an interesting way to de-orbit a stream from materials from LEO. Rather than build big expensive return vehicles (that require fuel for de-orbiting), one could build origami return vehicles that deorbit automatically due to thin atmosphere at LEO. Robotic machinery would create sheet metal (from nickel-iron asteroids), fold it,
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Paper planes for planetary exploration (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can track it, you can learn stuff about the reentry characteristics of ultra-light probes.
Now, think about the consequences of that for a moment. Most existing reentry vehicles are reentry vihicles designed to return personnel and equipment and data to ground level, but when you explore other planets the data flow goes the other way. There's also a lot of data that doesn't have to be collected from the ground. So, instead of an orbiter chucking two or three big chunky armored landers which attempt to survive crashing into the surface, and then trying to get a rover to crawl out of the lander and chug for miles to get somewhere interesting (without falling down a hole), why not release a cloud of ultralites and have them beam back picture info and data as they they drift earthwards? If you could insert an ultralite robotic aircraft into the atmosphere (of the type they currently use for weather sensing), it wouldn't have to land, and some of these designs might be able to stay aloft for years. Couple that with a microsatellite relay network and you potentially have a good system.
Alternatively you could go down the balloon path ... instead of a conventional balloon carrying a heavy heavy metal box with electronics in ... instead, stick your CCD chips to the balloon, print additional circuitry and perhaps solar cells directly onto the surface, perhaps use the upper and lower surfaces as charge carriers to avoid batteries, or have the lower surface metallised and the upper transparent, and use it as a solar collector.
With a whole bunch of these balloons drifting about in the upper atmosphere, you have an ad-hoc signal relay system. Hell, give em internet protocols. You won't be able to steer them, and you'd always be losing contact with a few, but a mission could carry along hundreds of them. The transponders would only have to be comparatively short-range, maybe you could even beam power from the orbiter. If you want random mapping plus a study of the atmosphere, bung 'em into a low orbit and wait for them to decay.
Perhaps a future Venus mission might well involve an orbiter repeatedly chucking a series of fifty cheap, disposable, "smart" transponder-equipped paper planes into the Venusian atmosphere and relaying that data back to Earth.
The first step is developing and testing materials. The second is using a tracking system to see how well they cope with reentry. The third is embedding smarter electronics.
Re:why not metal foil? (Score:5, Funny)
At normal altitude, a tin foil hat can block the ray for a single person, dropped in space however, the tin foil plane might block mind control of enough people, to actually affect the outcome of the upcoming elections.
Remember, if we're provided a proper tinfoil cover, we will no longer welcome our <insert pathetica> overlords.
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http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ [mit.edu]
Tinfoil hats actually amplify frequencies controlled by the government (very likely the ones the government would choose to use for mind control). The tinfoil hat is a lie.
Unless, of course, this study was produced with government funding and is an attempt to dissuade people from wearing their hats........the conspiracy lives on.
Layne
What if it crashes (Score:5, Funny)
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RTFA!! (Score:2, Funny)
How would you know if it "worked"? (Score:2)
And how can they not know if it is 30cm or 40cm? that's quite a range, haven't they picked the paper yet?
Anyhow, if they do it, I'd claim success! You won't be able to prove it didn't make it all the way down OK, unless you find its charred remains, but just in case, I would litter "seed" charred remains about, so that I could claim any found "were just a test model", thus ensuring victory!
This is brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
First, for those who say they've never seen a paper airplane break 100MPH, that's at 1 atmosphere. Mach 7 is definitely not at 1 atmosphere.
Second, for those who say it would flip, try writing a stability proof sometime. do you know how to apply inverse kinematics? can you write an equation for the Jacobian of a human elbow joint?
Third, the first step is to try one small paper plane. It'll probably not work, and we'll have to try again. Eventually, we might get a working 8" plane. Some day, we might even have a meter long plane that can bring 3 ounces back to earth.
Imagine an astronaut who is sick, and we need to get some lab tests run. Sending a shuttle or Soyouz down is incredibly wasteful. OTOH, a paper airplane could be equipped with a tracking device (think 1-2oz GPS & transmitter) and a small sample case. We drop the plane, and it's got a 1-in-3 chance of getting the sample into the right hands, in a usable condition. So we drop 5 or 10 and hope for the best.
Think of the potential when we start building larger stations & craft in space. A line of bolts could shear off, and we might not have the ability to analyze it in space. We drop one on each of 5 paper planes, and get a good idea from 2 that we recover of what happened. Were the bolts defective? Was it a fatigue issue? Were they improperly installed?
Imagine a very low cost mission to a near Earth crossing object. Half a dozen paper planes could let us get a few ounces of samples on the cheap.
Andy
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Still... a cool idea nonetheless. I wonder if the ISS is fitted out with any sort of small-capacity cargo-return capsule... (But at the same time, the space agencies probably wouldn't risk the health o
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Scenario: Ship on re-entry orbit to earth.
Officer: "Captain, you're not going to believe this, but we were just passed by a paper airplane...."
(I know, I know, even if it ended up in orbit, the orbit would have degraded in that much time, but I'd still like to see the expression on the guy's face when he sees it fly by the viewscreen."
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Translation (Score:4, Informative)
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Pink Tentacle? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm a total perv myself but I'm just having a hard time dealing with a news source with that name that has nothing to do with Hentai... maybe that's my problem... I must be too much of a perv.
But then again, I am on slashdot, there must be tons of us unable to process this
De-Orbit? (Score:5, Interesting)
The ISS Orbits the Earth at around 7.400k/s at an altitude of 365k. You can't just throw something out of the ISS and hit the Earth's atmosphere for Re-entry. If you "throw" it out of the ISS, it'll orbit, just like the ISS. In order to intersect with the Earth's atmosphere for areo-braking, you are going to need to lower he perigee of your orbit to at least 50-60k. You'll need a delta V of about 100 m/sec to do this.
What gives? Have they built an oragami retrograde rocket as well?
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Re:De-Orbit? (Score:5, Informative)
One way of thinking about orbits is that a satellite is perpetually falling towards the earth, because of gravity, but also perpetually missing, because of the lateral velocity component.
To make the paper plane de-orbit, you could throw it in the opposite direction to the ISS at the same velocity as the ISS is travelling: 27 500 km/h. Then the plane won't have any lateral velocity component, and will fall straight down.
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Wait ... so, orbiting really is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing? :-P
I must say though, I'm somewhat baffled by the whole "paper plan in space" thingy as I can't for the life of me figure out what it's going to accomplish.
Cheers
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Remember that orbiting a planet is carrying a velocity that moves you tangent to the planet at a rate equal to the graviti
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If you throw the paper plane down far enough won't it still fall(just not straight down)? It would seem that the tangent velocity would not be high enough to sustain a lower orbit.
It won't fall. But you are exactly right - the tangent velocity is indeed not high enough to sustain the lower orbit, so it will actually rise into a higher orbit after a while. What actually happens is that it will orbit in a slightly more elliptical orbit than the one from which it was thrown, causing it to rise and fall in a cycle when viewed from the original orbit.
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The ISS isn't really above the atmosphere, it's above *most* of the atmosphere. Periodic reboosting is necessary. So if you just set the paper plane outside the lock (Perpendicular to the orbital direction) its orbit would decay faster, due to its higher surface-area/mass ratio. Beyond that, a retrograde through, while not 100m/s, would certainly decrease its orbital velocity. You still might have
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If you just placed the paper plane just outside the airlock of the space station, without any additional momentum added, would the space station's mass exert a small gravity well that would keep the plane alongside the station? Or is the Earth's gravity stronger at that point because of the space station's altitude that the plane would be pulled toward Earth?
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The ISS can last months and even years in a semi-stable orbit without re-boosting. The ISS also has gyro's that help it shift it's gravitional gradient around in order to help keep the orbit stable. The orbit will eventually decay, yes. Each shuttle mission does clean up the ISS orbit, but the orbit wouldn't decay for a few years. It only drops around 3km per month. But that effect would be exponential as the orbit decreases.
The ISS has a
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This can't be right. I'll admit it's not easy to find air density figures for those altitudes, but look at the decay rates of other small satellites. The SNOE reentered from a higher altitude than ISS after only 6 years, and it's mass/surface area ratio (the important factor here) was around 100 kg/m^2, much heavier (and thus likely to orbit
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You'd need to be very gradual about the acceleration. That means some kind of guidance system (even if it is just a wire) and propulsion that lasts for at least a few seconds.
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I'm not a rocket scientist, (hell I haven't even taken any physics classes) but in this context, throwing an object 'at the earth' is useless, because the earth is not an endless flat plane. It's starting out at a ridiculously high speed on a trajectory that could be described as perpendicular to the force of gravity, adding a slight acceleration toward the earth at any given time is a slight acceleration AWAY from the earth on the other side of the planet, which inevitably happens due to the combined forc
A few more things... (Score:4, Insightful)
For those who think this is a high-risk project, risk is the chance of failure multiplied by the cost. The cost of throwing a paper plane from the ISS is low compared to other experiments, and we will learn quite a bit, not matter what happens.
For those who think this is a waste of money, I understand. You would have never funded the research into better clocks that eventually led to better navigation, which led to Columbus' voyages. The idea of opening a new frontier does not excite you. You would have us turn inward like the Chinese did at one point, burn your own ships, and never venture out again. You will accept a stagnant society. Based on my understanding of you, I offer one suggestion: Please commit suicide. We're better off without you.
Andy
Re: origami deorbit (Score:4, Funny)
The full lyrics (Score:3, Funny)
oh yeah
(Keep talking whoa keep talking)
A mach 10 liftoff and special coated paper oh yeah
(I'll get the money I'll kill to get the money)
With a paperclip on the tail, out the airlock it'll bail
To be completely fair, we'll be catchin lots of air
In Creased Lightning
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go
Go creased lightning you're burning up on reentry
(Creased lightning go creased lightning)
Go creased lightning you're coasting through the atmosphere
You are s
Er... what is the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what is the point of this, exactly? I mean other than to launch a paper plane from what could be argued as a really cool place to throw one from?
I have a cunning plan (Score:5, Funny)
A bunch of paper airplanes with japanese writing on them, air brushed lightly at the nose to look like it's re-entered.
Thrown out the window over the local university.
Playing the odds, at least one of them will be seen landing by someone who reads slashdot. "Holy crap!" he/she (just kidding, he) shouts.
Mua-ha-ha-ha.... I don't know what step 2 is, but #3 is profit.
New crew escape vehicle... (Score:2)
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This isn't the best kind of PR (Score:2)
Origami Meteor? (Score:2)
Sounds like a new business opportunity for the Origami Boulder guy:
http://www.origamiboulder.com/ [origamiboulder.com]
Prior art (Score:2)
Dan East
Expensive paper airplane (Score:3, Insightful)
The cost to launch something to the ISS's orbit is something like $10,000/lb. Let's say they make it from typical 20-lb bonded paper - the kind you'd pull from a copier.A 500-sheet ream of 20-lb actually weighs about 5 lbs [howstuffworks.com], or 1/100th of a pound per sheet. Do out the math, and it works out to about $100/sheet of paper.
Ouch! That's an expensive paper airplane!
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Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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Some maths (Score:2, Interesting)
If we assume a surface area of 1000 sq cm, not unreasonable for a length of 30-40 cm, then and a re-entry time of 1000 seconds the energy must be lost at about 1 watt/sq cm, which seems possible.
The launch from the space station would appear to
If flying slow enough, why should it burn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If flying slow enough, why should it burn? (Score:5, Informative)
From the altitude the ISS is orbiting, there's no such thing as approaching the atmosphere "slowly". The ISS is traveling at about 17000 mph around the circumference of its circular orbit. In order to enter the atmosphere, a body in that orbit would have to slow down in order to enter an elliptical orbit which intersects the atmosphere. This requires a velocity change (delta v) of about 200-250 mph. Even with that change, you're still traveling at 16,750 mph, so that when you finally do hit atmosphere, the friction from the air will be very high, even if the air is thin. As the friction slows you down, you drop farther into the atmosphere, where the air is thicker and there is more friction. These two changes (air pressure and velocity change) work together to reach a point of maximum heating, and then taper off again as you reach subsonic speeds. The steeper the dive, the faster you reach thicker air, and the higher the max heating point will be.
Let's say for argument's sake that you wanted to drop straight down from where the ISS is orbiting, with no horizontal velocity. (That would require an instantaneous delta v of the whole 17000 mph, which is nigh impossible, but we'll assume we can for our thought experiment.) Since the ISS is orbiting at an altitude of about 225 miles, and the atmosphere is generally considered to start at the 62 mile mark, that's still 163 miles of vacuum free fall to contend with. Leaving out the square-of-the-distance effects of gravity fall off (which are close to negligible at these distances), we get a fall time of sqrt((163 miles)/(32 feet per second squared)) = 164 seconds. That gives us a velocity of (32 feet per second squared)*(164 seconds) = 5248 feet per second, or 3578 mph at the moment we hit the upper fringes of the atmosphere. The heating will certainly be less than the standard deorbit, but it is still a decent force to be reckoned with. Any angle larger than the vertical will require a smaller delta v but will result in a higher entry velocity and higher heating.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, "but AeroIllini! You totally contradicted yourself there!" I did. Except that as you vary the angle of entry from shallow to vertical, the graph of max heating reaches a peak and then falls off again. So for a very shallow entry, your heating will be lower than a steeper entry, but going even steeper the heating will taper off again until you reach vertical entry, which will have the lowest heating of all. Vertical entry also has the highest delta v requirement of all, and a shallow entry has the least delta v required.
I hope this answers your question.
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I forget what materials they said w
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If you have a light, re-entry vehicle which gradually decelerates from modest drag, you should have minimal heat. It also means you have a *very* long re-entry trajectory.
Drag generates the heat. If you have a low terminal velocity because you have high drag, you will generate a lot of heat. If you have a light-weight vehicle (small acceleration due to gravity, not a lot of gravity-induced kenetic
Not even a good joke (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too Much Time?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Better ways for *you* to spend money. I personally would spend quite a lot of money to be able to drop a paper plane out of a space station.
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(And that's ignoring that the whole thing might be Japan spending ITS money.)
maybe you're right... (Score:2)
Re:Too Much Time?? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the odds are against ever finding it. You might need to launch a hundred to have a decent chance of actually having someone find one.
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Re:Too Much Time?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't underestimate the power of pure curiosity. Maybe launching paper airplanes from a space station isn't directly going to contribute to anything great like curing cancer, but when that great thing does happen, I'm certain that the big leaps are going to be made by people that just followed their curiosity, instead of worrying about the significance of what they're doing.
As an example, Richard Feynman had sort of a breakdown early in his career. His inspiration had run out, everybody was waiting for the genius to do something brilliant, and he was feeling miserable. Then he decided that he wasn't going to care about people's expectations, about what kind of research was respectable, he was just going to follow up on the little things that interested him. He sat in a cafeteria, looked at a spinning plate (I don't remember the details, there was a spinning plate somehow) and he decided he would try to figure out the forces that made that plate spin like that. He did figure it out, proudly showed it to some senior, who said 'great, but what's the relevance'. There wasn't any, he'd just followed his nose, and solved a problem. Later that little solution turned into to the research that earned him a Nobel prize and became the most accurate scientific theory to date (or second most accurate, I'm no expert).
The point is that many scientists don't work well on something that is prescribed in any way. They need absolute freedom to just do stuff that interests them. If they really have to they can work on things that are more immediately relevant, but not with passion, and it'll never be as great as the stuff they do when just follow their instinct. And these scientists tend to be the ones that come up with the great breakthroughs.
So if these guys want to send up 30 grams with the next shuttle, and take up three minutes of the astronauts' time, I'm fine with that. It's important in a subtle way. It's also very cool.
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