Trease and the team created an origami like fold that can transform an 82 foot 25 meter solar panel into a much more manageable 8 9 foot 2 7 m diameter.
Origami flasher solar panels.
Lang robert j spencer magleby and larry howell.
Zirbel shannon a et al.
By adele peters 2.
Designing a solar panel with origami folds required some clever engineering origami is intended to work with paper but even the thinnest solar panels are several times thicker than heavy weight.
The working tabletop prototype of the.
Now imagine that planet is in another solar system where the bright light of its parent star is outshining everything around it.
This is what new technology from nasa is trying to do capture the first images of planets outside our solar system and you can make your own model of the spacecraft using origami.
Single degree of freedom rigidly foldable origami flashers.
For more information on the design of the solar panel see these publications.
Accommodating thickness in origami based deployable arrays journal of mechanical design 135 11 2013.
The application of origami to solar arrays isn t new but it is a mostly undiscovered frontier.