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Origami Plane to Fly From the Int. Space Station
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.
"Check out what I made!"
"Ha, that's sweet! You know what we should do with it?"
*Airlock Sounds*
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won't the paper flip when it starts to hit air, and burn up? How do you get a paper airplane to get to mach anything? I know how to make a very fast paper airplane for hand throwing, but it only goes maybe into the low 100 range... I never clocked it, though. Still, I think it would flip before getting that fast.
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China will probably vaporize it, just out of spite.
Even though it's in Japanese, just use Google Translate to read it.
Somebody gave me an origami book once. I never read it - I couldn't, it was all creased seven ways to Sunday.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Japan wants to fly paper plane from International Space Station to earth:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080118p2a00m0na025000c.html
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I would think that a metal foil would provide a better "paper" for the plane. Not only would it resist higher temperatures, but it would conduct heat from the hot side to radiate heat on the upper side. Chemically etching the foil on the upper surface to make it black would also help radiate heat. Finally, a metal foil plane would have a higher radar cross-section so it might be possible to track the trajectory and recover the plane.
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).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What if it crashes? All the boffins are gathered, scratching their heads, and then one of them will say "But it looked fine on paper!" Then all the others will groan, and proceed to calculate the optimum method for beating the crap out of him.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good point. Paper has got to be cheaper than our current heat tiles.
This is the Librarian wing of the JSA testing new paper for books. This paper, obviously with embedded copy protection coatings, will prove that books are better than websites, and gloriously launch the Japanese people to a state of technological superiority over western libraries. This is just stage one of the Paper Ninja Warriors contest.
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?
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Paper airplane? When I read the article, I read that the Japanese students wanted to recreate the finale from Final Fantasy VII where Sephiroth summons a meteor to destroy the planet! I've been taking Japanese class for almost 3 semesters, I should know what I'm talking about! :P
... i can think of much better ways to spend money.
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.
This is brilliant! The use is obvious. We need cheaper reentry vehicles. These vehicles would not be designed to bring back passengers, but there are times when you have 50 (harmless) samples and would like to get one of them to a lab earth-side.
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
I mean... I can't say any more than that. A news source, dedicated to the more unusual aspects of Japanese culture... called Pink Tentacle.
;)
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
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
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?
I'm not associated with the project, but I do have common sense.
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
Go creased lighting! Go creased lighting!
Because it's a fun, geeky thing to do. Why do you post on slashdot? It's essentilly a waste of time and (indirectly) money.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
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?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So, here's the thing. I've got a plane. And I have a window in the plane. The rules say (FAR 91.15) that I can chuck stuff out of the plane if I take reasonable precautions to avoid hurting anyone on the ground. So the answer here is simple:
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.
No, it won't. You're assuming it'll somehow magically come to a dead stop when released, then start to fall straight down. What will really happen is that it'll just get shoved into a slightly lower orbit, so it will hit the atmosphere at pretty much orbital velocity, just like the shuttle does.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Back of the envelope time:
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, 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!
Fuck you, scissors and rock!
400km up 27700 km/h the energy loss required is about 117kJ potential and 888kJ kinetic to land. say 1MJ. This is slightly reduceded as to get to an eacth grazing orbit the plane must be thrown backwards fom the space station eith a relative velocity of about 700km/h.
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 require rocket assistance.
We always think of re-entry of a spacecraft as this fiery process, but would it be possible for a paper airplane to approach the atmosphere slowly and enter it gently without any high temperatures? Perhaps someone can explain how this is impossible.
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.
Since there is no mention of instrumentation or tracking, I fail to see even the remotest point to this exercise. Who will know (or care) if this "plane" survives a Mach 7 reentry? It would take months or yers to deorbit if they just throw it out the shuttle. In the meantime, it joins all the orbiting debris as a hazard to near-Earth navigation. Even a paper airplane is a serious piece of debris if you are orbiting in the opposite direction. Kudos on the wind tunnel research, though. How about a study on the aerodynamics of a 20 thousand yen note with origami folds?
The
I preferred the google translation.
>Land in the world where you do not know the fairy who could deliver" a dream said.
Milton couldn't have said it better.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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.
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.
Eric Baird
We'll get some ISS launches and some wind tunnel tests
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 supreme the chicks'll cream for creased lightning