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Part 6 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
9. A Titan Sample Return Using In-Situ Propellants
Steven Oleson
NASA Glenn Research Center
     This grant is dedicated to a proposed Titan sample mission using in-situ volatile propellants available on the Titan surface. This approach to a Titan mission is very different from all other in-situ resource utilization concepts. It will accomplish a return of great scientific value towards planetary science, astrobiology, and understanding the origins of life. This will be an order of magnitude more difficult than other sample return missions.
10. ReachBot: Small Robot for Large Mobile Manipulation Tasks in Martian Cave Environments
Marco Pavone
Stanford University
     The object of this grant project is the development of a mission architecture where a long reach crawling and anchoring robot is deployed to explore and sample difficult terrains on planetary bodies. Extendable booms for mobile manipulation will be repurposed for this project. The key focus of the grant will be Mars.
      The robot concept for this project is called the “ReachBot.” It uses rollable extendable booms as manipulator arms and as highly reconfigurable structural members. ReachBot is capable of
1) Rapid and versatile crawling through sequences of long-distance gasps,
2) traversing a large workspace while anchored by adjusting boom lengths and orientations, and
3) applying high interaction forces and torques, leveraging boom tensile strength and the variety of anchors within reach. 
These features allow a light and compact robot to achieve versatile mobility and forceful interaction in traditionally difficult environment such as vertical cliff walls or uneven flowers of caves on Mars. In particular, ReachBot is uniquely suited for exploring and sampling Noachian targets on Mars that contain ancient materials preserved in strata in the form of cliff-face fractures and sublimation pits. These will be of significant historical and astrobiological information.
     In the NAIC Phase I effort, the team will investigate four key feasibility challenges:
1) Expanding the reachable kinematic and wrench workspace,
2) providing robust control and motion planning,
3) developing reliable surface grasping solutions, and
4) developing feasible mission architectures for exploration and sampling of Martian caves.
For testing, the team will build a planar prototype with several arms on the free-flyer robotic testbed at the Stanford Robotics Facility. If these tests are successful, this project will transition into an effort focused on building a full-scale robot to test the system in real-world environments.
     This study brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts in robotic autonomy, robotic manipulations, mechanical design, bioinspired grasping, and geological planetary science from Stanford.

Part 5 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
7. Extrasolar Object Interceptor and Sample Return Enabled by Compact, Ultra Power Dense Radioisotope Batteries
Christopher Morrison,
Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation in Seattle
     USNC-Tech is proposing that it investigate the creation of a compact twenty kilowatt eleven-hundred-pound, radioisotope-electric-propulsion spacecraft design. Their spacecraft will be powered by a novel Chargeable Atomic Battery that is capable of changes in velocity on the order of eleven to eighteen pounds per kilowatt. A spacecraft using this technology will be able to catch up to an extrasolar object, collect samples and then return to -Earth. This will be accomplished in a ten-year mission. The data than may be collected from samples and from interstellar objects has the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe.
     Two such objects from outside our solar system have passed through during the past three years. The USNC-Tech team wants to be ready for the next extrasolar object. The core innovation of this new spacecraft that will make such an amazing mission possible is the CAB. It has a power density of over thirty times the power density of plutonium-238. The CAB is easier and cheaper to manufacture than a radioisotope battery based on plutonium-238. In order to increase the safety of the CAB, the radioactive materials are encased in a robust matrix of carbide. This technology is greatly superior to nuclear fission systems for this application because fission systems require a critical mass where radioisotope systems can be much smaller and fit on smaller launch systems. This significantly reduces cost and complexity. 
8. Atomic Planar Power for Lightweight Exploration
E. Joseph Nemanick
The Aerospace Corporation
     The Atomic Planar Power for Lightweight Exploration is a technology intended for use on deep solar mission on low mass, fast transit space platforms. The Aerospace Corporation is going to explore an alternative vehicle architecture that integrates a long-lived, peak power capable, rechargeable, and modular power system with solar sail propulsion. They will also investigate possible new missions that this technology will enable. New solar sail capability allows rapid missions to the far realms of the Solar System. Such a spacecraft could reach Jupiter in six months, Saturn in less than a year, Pluto in four years, etc. While the solar sail propulsion system is the key to fast transit, the mission is made possible by the new power system.
     APPLE contains a durable radiation-harden battery that is combined with a radioisotope electric power system. It is packaged in a planar form factor to power a solar sail vehicle. It is powered by a layered structure of radioisotope materials that is backed by layers of solid-state, radiation-hardened battery and thermal-to-electrical conversion technology. Laboratory analysis indicated that relacing the existing Juno power system and propulsion with APPLE would reduce to power system mass by over eighty percent and reduce the transit time by ninety percent.
     The new radiation-hard battery is being developed by a collaboration between Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Aerospace Corporation. The power system employs the radiation-hard battery to allow close contact with the radioisotope source for waste heat utilization. This does not impact electrical conversion efficiency. The large solar sail area is used to efficiently dissipate heat.
     Using thermal, Monte Carlo modeling with CAD, coupled with space power simulations, the AC team will demonstrate the feasibility of the APPLE concept. The team will then apply the APPLE concept to possible missions such as sending a probe to Pluto in order to investigate mission advantages over traditional deep space mission approaches such as New Horizon. The rapid transit times allowed by solar sail propulsion which are enabled by APPLE will permit many significant new deep space missions for scientific investigations.

Part 4 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
6. Autonomous Robotic Demonstrator for Deep Drilling
Quinn Morley,
Planet Enterprises in Gig Harbor, Washington
      It is believed by experts that there is subglacial liquid water on Mars at a depth of about a mile in the South Polar Layered Deposits. When Orosei et al. in 2018 published their evidence for this, it sent shockwaves through the aerospace community. Chris McKay is a Senior Scientist for the NASA Ames Research Center. He came on the Planetary Radio podcast and said, “If we’re going to do astrobiology, we need to not just see it, we need to get a piece of it, we need to get a sample of it. So I think this becomes a very strong argument for deep drilling.”
     Sori & Bramson in 2019 claimed that the water there is in a liquid phase because of heat produced by volcanic activity under the crust. Analysts say that this geological formation and subglacial lake might harbor life. Prior to the publication of these discoveries, the SPLD was already considered one of the most scientifically significant formations on Mars. It was subjected to atmospheric and climactic changes dating back four billion years. This was published by Bar-Cohen in 2009.
     There is no technology that can perform deep drilling on Mars. The InSight HP3 “mole” probe is currently the best technology and it was only able to penetrate a few centimeters into the Martian surface. There are no autonomous deep drilling systems currently in the NASA technology pipeline according to Zacky, 2018.
      The purpose of this grant is to design an autonomous drilling system that would utilize a Perseverance-type rover as a drill rig. The rover would have to be fitted with minimal appropriate scientific instrumentation of redundancy. The ultimate drilling strategy will have to have a high level of redundancy. This drilling system does not rely on cables that trail behind the drill. Instead, self-contained robots will drive up and down the borehole autonomously. These robots have been nicknamed “borebots” and are about a yard long.
      The borebots created by this project will be deployed from a tube which is moved into position by simple linear actuators on the deck of a Martian rover. Locomotion is provided by rubber tank tracks that press against the sides of the borehole. The borebots will drill about six inches into the Martian surface. Then the ice core is cut off and brought back to the surface by having the borebot drive back up the hole. A robotic arm attached to the rover will remove the borebot from the hole and transfer it into one of the service bays in the side of the rover for core sample removal and automated servicing. Once the previous borebot has been removed from the borehole, another borebot can be placed in the hole and start drilling the next ice core. About a dozen borebots could potentially be housed in service bays. Shorter bays near the back of the rover could be used to house extra coring bits and other spare parts for the borebots.
     When an ice core is removed from a borebot in one of the service bays, the rover will prepare the ice core for on site analysis or cache it for later retrieval and remote analysis. It may be possible to perform some analysis on site and then cache the ice cores for more remote analysis. Preserving the integrity of the ice cores must be a top priority.
     The proposed mission will be to drill sixty feet to one hundred and fifty feet deep into the SPLD using a nuclear-powered Perseverance-type Martian rover and the borebot drilling architecture. If the first planned mission is achieved in ninety days, an extended mission might be able to drill down as much as a mile. The system does not grow in complexity as greater depths are reached. Consumable scale linearly. The extended mission could take about four years and thousands of ice core samples would be extracted. The samples would be analyzed, and data acquired transmitted back to Earth. Dozens of sample ice cores could be cached during the extended mission. This study will evaluate concept feasibility, determine the range of possible borehole travel speeds, evaluate power consumption and power sources, evaluate strategies to persevere the integrity of the sample ice cores and assess the scientific instrumentation relevant to ice core analysis.

Part 3 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
4. Kilometer-Scale Space Structures from a Single Launch
Zachary Manchester
Carnegie Mellon University
     Long duration manned spaceflight poses serious problems for the human body including muscle atrophy, bone loss, degradation of eyesight, cardiac issues, and suppression of the immune system. Many of these problems arise from the lack of gravity in space. It is possible to generate artificial gravity in space by rotating a space habitat. Unfortunately, there are serious challenges for using such a system to generate artificial gravity, Human beings experience motion sickness and discomfort when subjected to a rotation rate more than a few revolution per minute. In order to produce artificial gravity equivalent to gravity at the surface of the Earth, a structure about fifteen hundred feet in size in needed for a rotation rate of one to two revolutions per minute.
     In order to accomplish this requirement, there have been recent designs developed for using advanced mechanical metamaterials to design a lightweight deployable structure that would have an expansion ratio of one hundred and fifty to one. Such a structure could be launched inside the fairing of a Falcon Heavy rocket. Once in orbit, the structure could be deployed autonomously to a final size of more than a kilometer or more without requiring complex assembly in orbit by astronauts. This current project will study a mission concept that is similar to NASA’s planned Lunar Gateway which calls for kilometer-scale deployable structures to form the backbone of a huge rotating space station.
5. PEDALS: Passively Expanding Dipole Array for Lunar Sounding
Patrick McGarey
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
      Understanding the subsurface composition and structure of terrestrial planets is the key to revealing their geological history including crustal differentiation, volcanism, sedimentation, basin formation and volatile transport and accumulation. One of the common geophysical techniques for probing the subsurface is the use of radar which can be implementation through Earth-based bistatic, orbital or surface configurations. In previous cases, missions which incorporated radar instruments operate antennas which have fixed resonant frequencies. This is usually limited to one or two operating frequency bands.
      MARSIS, an orbital instrument which was sent to Mars, has a one hundred- and thirty-four-foot antenna sounding radar. This provides kilometer scale penetration and global coverage. The collection of data is hindered by relatively low signal-to-noise ratio, coarse resolution, and ambiguous surface reflection that arise from topography. With regard to the consideration of frequency limitations that constrain the use of single, fixed-length dipole, this project proposes the Passively Expanding Dipole Array for Lunar Sounding. This Array is made up of a series of discrete dipoles that, through unique combination and couplings of short dipoles into larger ones, extends the effective resolution by allowing for variable frequencies and depths. The key innovation of PEDALS is its unique capability to measure a wide and continuous ranges of depths from different spatial locations. No prior ground penetrating radar implementation has been able to do this. PEDALS deploys four tethers in a cross pattern by leveraging shape-memory materials for passive unrolling and can be incorporated on a variety of lunar missions. Key science goals that are motivating a PEDALS mission include developing and understanding the crustal structures at depths comparable to the thickness of the crust, as well as surveying the distribution of volatiles in the regolith and subsurface void detection.

Part 2 of 12 Parts
   Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects.
2. Sustained CubeSat Activity Through Transmitted Electromagnetic Radiation
Sigrid Close
Stanford University
The SCATTER project studies the capacity of a parent spacecraft to transmit power to and remotely manipulate a small probe spacecraft through a laser transmitter and receiver. Such a capacity would allow the mothership to intermittently deploy probes during a long duration deep space mission to Uranus. The use of solar cells and batteries would be infeasible to power such daughter probes. These probes would allow a single mission to provide multiple scientific measurements such as magnetic field gradients which would lead to a better understanding of the outer planets.
3. Ablative Arc Mining for In-Situ Resource Utilization
Amelia Greig
University of Texas, El Paso
    As manned missions to other planetary bodies are carried out, sustainable ISRU infrastructure to make use of local resources for water, building materials, and propellants must be developed. Water is one of the most important resources and it has been the focus of many studies. However, the ability to mine other resources will also become more important. A good mining system should provide for extraction of water and as many other local materials as possible. Ablating surface material with electric arcs produces free ionized particles that can be sorted by mass into separate material groups and transported to a relevant collector via electromagnetic fields. Collectors that are specific to each material type will be utilized in parallel to provide for maximum collection efficiencies and storage conditions for retention. The ionizing arch, electromagnetic sorting and transport, and collector modules will be enclosed in a surface vehicle. This can lead to diverse, efficient, and wide-coverage in-situ resource use for human space exploration. By using an arch to both ablate and ionize the regolith particles, the transport and collection of the volatile materials is more controlled and efficient that the random walks of rarefied neutral particles that are the basis for thermal mining techniques. Using a magnetic field to separate volatiles means that this technique can be readily applied to any material in the regolith, including water and metals ions, in a single system design.
     In order to prove the feasibility of ablative lunar arch mining and to determine the potential mining production rates and power requirements, further study is needed. The overall goal of the Phase I NIAC grant is to research and develop a feasible ISRU architecture using ablative arc mining to support lunar explanatory missions. There are three primary objectives for this project.
1) Define a combination ablative arc and electromagnetic transport system for the simultaneous extraction of water, silicon and nickel.
2)  Design a mission architecture that is able to produce twenty-two thousand pounds per year to support planned lunar exploration programs.
3)  Evaluate the proposed mission architecture concept against other ISRU concepts that are currently under investigation, including resistive heating, microwave heating and direct solar heating.
    The two main outcomes of the work will be
1) a mission architecture design at Mission Concept Review level and
2) a mission level trade study of ISRU concepts using criteria evaluated within the framework of supporting a crewed lunar mission.
Please read Part 3 next

Part 1 of 12 Parts
   Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Jenn Gustetic, is the director of early-stage innovations and partnerships within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. She said, “NIAC Fellows are known to dream big, proposing technologies that may appear to border science fiction and are unlike research being funded by other agency programs. We don’t expect them all to come to fruition but recognize that providing a small amount of seed-funding for early research could benefit NASA greatly in the long run.”
     For 2021, STMD has selected sixteen Phase I NIAC proposals. These offer a wide range of inventions and applications. Each of these proposals will receive up to one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in funding. If they are successful in the nine-month feasibility studies, NIAC Fellows can apply for Phase II grants. All of these NIAC studies, regardless of which phase they are in, are early-stage technology development efforts. They are not considered to be office NASA project and may never become actual NASA missions.
Here are the sixteen grantees:
1. Regolith Adaptive Modification System to Support Early Extraterrestrial Planetary Landings
Sarbajit Banerjee
Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
    This project was conceived for the selective reinforcement and fusing of native lunar surface materials. It follows on earlier research at NASA focused on the construction of flexible lightweight landing platforms. Current lunar regolith research utilizes technologies that require significant lunar infrastructure. These technologies include sintering and geopolymerization. This new project is well suited for supporting deployment during early landings. However, it can also be used for more mature construction activities after establishment of lunar settlements.
     RAMS use novel microcapsule delivery systems that supply precursors which activate upon deployment to spot-weld anchor points binding the surface structures to the underlying lunar regolith through in situ formation of advanced high-strength steel pegs. This same system also delivers additional subsurface regolith stabilization precursors that are injected deeper withing the soil and activated by the initial exothermic reaction resulting in an underlying continuous layer of thermite-fused and geopolymerized regolith constituting a base that provides additional load-bearing capacity. Dust mitigation and bearing capacity are provided by both reaction/solidification chemistry and a physical mesh barrier.
     RAMs includes the following novel technologies. 1) Built in microcapsules-based welding and regolith solidification system consisting of safer nanothermite mixtures and soil stabilizers designed to activate sequentially to form pig iron-based anchors as well as advanced high-strength and ductile steel anchors. These anchors extend along the edge of the platform and penetrate into the regolith matrix under the platform. 2) The use of energy stored in the chemical bonds of regolith materials as the main source of energy to power the in-situ spot welding and creation of embedded alloy frameworks. This system will anchor assets like flexible pads to a planetary surface by generating in-situ the equivalent of seismic grade alloys if needed. These will enable platforms to survive the thermal and mechanical stresses incumbent during repeated propulsive landing. Both the nanothermite and the encapsulating systems are light weight and safe to launch into space.
Please read Part 2 next

Part 2 of 2 Parts
     Solar thermal propulsion has two particular areas of application. Earth-orbit transfers and scientific interplanetary missions.
      The primary commercial application of solar thermal propulsion is the orbital transfer to larger communications satellites from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous Earth orbits. Multiple ignitions appear to be the best method for orbital transfer. This requires about twelve tons of liquid hydrogen which produces a specific impulse of seven hundred and fifty s.
      The second main application of solar thermal propulsion will be for interplanetary missions. For these missions, large arcs of solar concentrators are needed to accurate focus sunlight on the absorber. The heat captured is then transferred directly to the propellant which creates a continuous thrust for the spacecraft. This method provides a much higher efficiency of conversion of sunlight to energy.
     Conventional chemical rocket propulsion has been compared to solar thermal propulsion. A study on a Pluto flyby mission was carried out. It indicated that solar thermal propulsion could propel a larger payload than chemical propulsion with the same amount of fuel. This would reduce the ultimate cost of such missions.
     Solar thermal propulsion is a promising new system for space travel. It has the potential to significantly reduce the launch sots of commercial satellites. Performance for interplanetary missions will also be raised. However, key technologies required by solar thermal propulsion will need to be developed before solar thermal propulsion is possible. These technologies include improvement in the heat capacity of heat exchangers, lightweight and rigid structures for the sunlight capture systems and the ability to store cryogenic hydrogen for long periods.
          The absorber/receiver is the part of the system that absorbs and transfers the energy of the concentrated sunlight to the propellant. A heat exchanger is used to heat the propellant. The heat can be transferred continuously, or it can be accumulated and then transferred in a burst.
     The performance of solar thermal propulsion lies between conventional chemical rocket propulsion and ion drive propulsion. Specific impulse is a measure of how efficiently a rocket uses a propellant. Seconds are the units used for specific impulse abbreviated as “s”. When employing indirect solar heating, a solar thermal system cannot produce a specific impulse of more than nine hundred s. This is due to some limitation on the temperatures that the heat exchanger material can withstand.
      On the other hand, for direct solar heating, direct heat absorption allows higher propellant temperatures. It has a higher specific impulse of about twelve hundred s. Only indirect solar thermal heating has been experimentally tested. The United States Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory used small-scale models to verify the limit of indirect solar thermal heating. Full sized prototypes have yet to be built but the models that have been tested so far show that the basic concept of solar thermal propulsion is sound.
     At this time, the best use of solar thermal propulsion is in commercial satellites. Any future developments in this area are going to depend on the ultimate cost of this type of propulsion.

Part 1 of 2 Parts
    I have often blogged about propulsion systems for spacecraft. There are many options for propelling big spacecraft including manned missions. On the other hand, there are also a variety of ways to maneuver satellites to adjust their orbits around the Earth. Some propulsion systems can be useful for both purposes. Today, I am going to blog about such a new satellite propulsion system.
     One of the free sources of energy in space is obviously sunlight. It can be used to generate electricity, drive a light sail, or for solar thermal propulsion. The basic idea behind solar thermal propulsion is to use sunlight to heat a propellant up to two thousand degrees Kelvin. The expanding propellant is then fed through a conventional rocket nozzle to produce thrust. A solar thermal propelled rocket only requires a way to capture sunlight and a tank of propellant. The thrust that can be generated is limited by the surface area of the solar collector and the intensity of solar radiation. Sunlight is collected by a parabolic reflector and then focused onto a blackbody cavity to generate a high internal temperature. In the cavity, heat is transferred to the propellant to provide thrust. The best performance can be obtained from hydrogen as a fuel because it has such a low molecular weight.
     Unfortunately, hydrogen is the lightest element and it is very difficult to store because it can leak from just about any type materials used as containers and seals. In the early 2010s, research and design work developed an approach to significantly reduce what is called “hydrogen boiloff”. While it is not possible to totally eliminate hydrogen loss, a way was found to economically utilize the small boiloff that remains for necessary in-space tasks. This essentially results in what can be thought of as zero boiloff from a practical point of view.
     There are other possible fuels for solar thermal propulsion. Unfortunately, water would be a very poor fuel. It can only produce a specific impulse of about 200 s.On the other hand, it only requires simple equipment to purify and handle. Water is easy to store and there are sources of water in space on the Moon, Mars, comets and asteroids. Water has been seriously proposed for use on interplanetary missions.
     Ammonia has been proposed as a possible propellant for solar thermal propulsion. It has a greater specific impulse than water and is easy to store with a freezing point of minus seventy-seven degrees Celsius and a boiling point of minus thirty-three degrees Celsius. The exhaust dissociates into hydrogen and nitrogen.
   
     Concentrators are utilized to collect sunlight and focus it into a receiver/absorber. Big collector surfaces in the range of several square yards are needed to produce the required thermal energy. A useful solar power input would be about one thousand three hundred and fifty watts per square meter. The primary concentrators handle this part of the propulsion. They are considered to be the most technologically demanding section of the concentrator system.
Please read Part 2 next

Part 2 of 2 Parts
     Parabolic reflectors are an obvious choice for use in space applications because they either pick up or send information in a specific direction. However, their bowl-shape makes it inconvenient to store in a launch vehicle with limited room. This is an even bigger problem when many antennas need to be launched on the same vehicle.
    It turns out that origami engineering is a solution to the problem of launching parabolic antennas. With this technique, a flat, two dimensional structure can be folded into complex three dimensional shapes. If parabolic antennas can be made into flat shapes by using origami, then they can be stacked or rolled up inside of a launch vehicle package. When they are ready to be deployed in orbit, they can be unrolled and folded into their functional parabolic shape. Hartl explained that folding a piece of flat material into a smooth bowl shape is difficult and non-intuitive.
     Hartl said, “Conventional origami design entails folding thin sheets of material at sharp creases. Engineering structures, on the other hand, have a thickness, and the choice of material can make it hard to get these sharp creases. Consequently, we need to create folds that exhibit smooth bending.”
     In order to facilitate paper-like folding at the creases, Hartl’s team employed shape-memory composites that change their shape when they are heated. In addition, these composites are inexpensive, light, flexible and they are capable of being stretched multiple times without being damaged.
     First, the team built a flat two-dimensional surface using strips of shape-memory composites and card stock. Pieces of stiff cardstock are used to form flat facets which are held together by pieces of the shape-memory composite. This is similar to how the radial ribs in an umbrella hold the fabric in an inverted bowl-shape. At the vertices where the composite sections meet, the team cut tiny holes to serve as corner creases when the assembly folds into a three-dimensional parabola in orbit.
    When the composites are heated, they change their shape by bending systematically and lift the cardstock pieces into the parabola bowl-shape. As mentioned above, tests show that their origami antenna functions as well as a regular parabolic antenna.
     Hartle said that his research in an important step using the principles of origami to construct highly functional engineering structures that can be stored compactly and easily deployed after launch. He also said, “In addition to other applications, future advances based on this research will likely result in morphing reflector antennas for military and space telecommunication applications.”
     Other members of Hartl’s team include Sameer Jape, Milton Garza and Dr. Dimitris Lagoudas from the aerospace engineering department; Joshua Ruff and Francisco Espinal from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Deanna Sessions and Dr. Gregory Huff from Pennsylvania State University; and Edwin A Peraza Hernandez from the University of California, Irvine.
      There is a bright future for technical origami in the space industry.

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     It seems that the ancient Japanese paper folding art of origami is finding uses in the space industry. I recently posted an article about using origami techniques to make foldable fuel tanks. Now engineers are using it to make foldable antennas.
     Origami is a combination of the Japanese word “ori” meaning “folding” and Japanese word “kami” meaning “paper.” Origami is now used to mean all folding techniques regardless of what culture they came from. The goal of the origami is to convert a flat square sheet of paper into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques. Modern folding techniques usually discourage the use of cuts, glue or marking of the paper.
     There are a small number of basic origami folds which can be combined in a huge variety of ways to make very intricate designs. The principles of origami are also used to design stents, packaging and other engineering applications.
      Technical origami is a term that is applied to the design of origami folds via an engineering crease pattern. The field of origami mathematics allows designers to figure out the system of folds for a particular result before any paper is actual folded. Origami mathematics was developed by Robert Lang, Meguro Toshiykui and others. It allows for the creation of extremely complex figures with multi-extensions such as many legged centipedes, complete human figures, and many other shapes.
     When designers are working on packages for deployment in space, space and materials are at a premium. Many components can be packed into small spaces but bowl-shaped antennas are very difficult to reduce in size for launch.
     Now researchers at Texas A&M are using the principles of origami to create a parabolic structure from a flat surface using a shape-memory polymer. When these memory polymers are heated, they change their shape in a systematic and controlled way that mimics the folding of origami. This reshaping lifts and rearranges the polymer into the shape of a bowl. They have tested their design and shown that it functions as well as regular bowl-shaped antennas. Their research was reported in the journal Smart Materials and Structures.
     Dr. Darren Hartl is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering of Texas A&M. He said, “Initially, we were largely focused on self-folding origami structures: how would you make them, how would you design them into different shapes, what material would you use? Having answered some of these questions, we turned to some real-world applications of origami engineering, like adaptive antennas, for which there has been very little work done. In this study, we combine folding behavior and antenna performance and address that gap.”
     Antennas come in a variety of designs. Their major function is to transmit or receive information in the form of electromagnetic waves. Some antennas are used to communicate between television stations and satellites in Earth orbit. These antennas have a parabolic or bowl shape. A parabolic shape means that electromagnetic waves that arrive in parallel at the antenna are converged into a single point in the center of the antenna. Conversely, when these parabolic antennas are used to transmit electromagnetic waves, the waves are generated at a point in the center of the parabola and sent out in parallel.
Please read Part 2