Thu, Jan 24, 2008
Finally... A Paper Airplane That Won't Land You In
Detention!
If you love flight, perhaps you have experienced the urge to
throw a paper airplane from a really high place... but what if you
had the chance to throw a paper airplane from the International
Space Station? It turns out a Japanese professor and a group of
origami masters have collaborated on a paper airplane which will
fly that very mission.
According to the London Telegraph, Professor Shinji Suzuki, from
the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of
Tokyo, worked on the project with the Japan Origami Airplane
Association. They used silicon treated heat resistant paper, folded
to create a tiny paper aircraft with a rounded nose.
Tossed from the space station, it will be travelling at Mach 20.
By the time it encounters significant heating in the atmosphere, it
will have dropped to Mach 7. Amazingly, a smaller version of the
plane survived a test run at Mach 7 in a wind tunnel last week,
where it survived temperatures as high as 570 degrees Fahrenheit.
As Ray Bradbury fans know, that's quite a feat.
Professor Suzuki says the hope is to have a real paper
spacecraft ready to send with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata,
when he travels to the ISS later this year. He says the technology
from paper planes could lead to the development of new transport
craft, which makes this paper airplane a serious science
experiment.
So... why didn't our grade-school science teachers ever buy that
excuse?
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