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Last Updated: Wednesday, 10 December, 2003, 10:02 GMT E-mail this to a friend Printable version Origami help for tech design
Origami - the Japanese art of folding paper to make models - is being put to a new use - to help engineers design, amongst other things, new telescopes and cars. Exploiting the study of the way that paper folds, known as computational origami, can reveal both better ways to construct objects and also predict how they will respond to certain pressures. In practical terms, this is being applied to space telescopes, amongst other things, to crack a long-standing problem - how to fit a bigger lens inside the finite room of a space shuttle. "There is this application where we wanted a really big telescope, twice the size of Hubble," assistant professor Eric Demaine, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BBC World Service's Science In Action programme. "The trouble is that at scale the lens doesn't fit in the space shuttle, as space shuttles are fairly narrow. "So you take this big lens, you fold it so that occupies some vertical space and less horizontal space, you put it in the shuttle, launch it into space. | |
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