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'Starshade' and 'Transformers' Origami-Inspired Spacecraft

Origami has inspired a number of unique spacecraft designs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It addresses a persistent problem faced by JPL engineers - how do you pack the greatest amount of spacecraft into the smallest volume possible? The 'Starshade' is an immense, folding iris that has been proposed as a way to block light from distant stars. It would unfurl to a diameter of about 85 feet in space, about the size of a standard baseball diamond.

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Aerospace Automation Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] [Origami at JPL] [Scientist are using the ancient craft of folding paper to create structures that can be used in space.] I got into origami after I realized it could be useful for making big spacecraft structures. And now I love it as a means of, not only design but of prototyping and visualizing designs. There's something wonderful about being able to fold something at a very small scale and have it capture

    00:00:31 design principles that can be applied to a variety of scales. It's very accessible. Just grab a sheet of paper and you can begin designing anywhere. The challenge about it that I love the most is that in origami, every fold is intimately and geometrically tied to every other fold in the pattern. So to create an adjustment of height or length or width or thickness of any one part affects all of the parts.

    00:00:52 So it's a highly interdependent complex network. So it's a very fun design space to explore. [Origami-inspired projects at JPL include Large unfolding structures, like star shades for space telescopes. and small collapsible robots, like PUFFER.] [LOGO: Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology]