Origami Papercraft to Save Spacecraft Collisions in Future

A team of researchers has created a paper model of a Metamaterial that which uses folding creases to soften the forces and help to relax stresses in the chain. This sparked to them after obtaining inspiration from the Japanese paperwork Origami. These folds can bear high impact collisions. This will help us to build a reusable spacecraft. The landing of the spacecraft is very stressful as it had to bear the entire impact force with the landing pad.

One of the ways to turn this down is to build the bottom with such kind of materials which will help to absorb some of the forces and soften the blow. These researchers belong to the University of Washington in the US who developed this new solution to reduce the impact forces. If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you would never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it is no longer pushing, but pulling." said Jinkyu Yang, an associate professor at the University of Washington.

In the paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team designed a Metamaterial to have the properties they wanted. Yang said, "Metamaterials are like Legos. You can make all kind of structures that you need by repeating a single type of block. Besides, depending on how you design, you can create mechanical properties that are not foreseen in nature. This enables us to create materials with different degrees of stiffness when they fold and unfold. Miyazawa said, "We have created a unit cell that softens the force that acts on it and then accentuates the tension that follows and the cell returns to its normal shape. The team used a laser cutter to do it.