Space: final frontier for the paper plane

Published on Wednesday 6 February 2008 21:31

IT WILL be a giant leap for paper-plane kind. Later this year Japanese scientists plan to launch a specially designed paper craft from the International Space Station.

Travelling at 17,000mph – the orbiting speed of the station – it is likely to cover more than a million miles before plunging into the Earth's atmosphere, already having shattered every record in the book.

But, the scientists hope, its journey will not end in a tiny fireball as this most unusual spacecraft burns up on re-entry.

For a test carried out yesterday by Shinji Suzuki, a professor of aerospace engineering at Tokyo University, showed the plane was capable of withstanding temperatures of up to 250C and winds seven times the speed of sound.

He now plans to give a number of the 20cm planes, which have been treated with chemicals to resist heat and rain, to a Japanese astronaut for a launch from space station later this year.

The theory is that paper craft may escape the worst of the friction and heat that space shuttles face on re-entry and, if the first mission is a success, the technology could be used to make unmanned spacecraft.

"Paper planes are extremely light so they slow down when the air is thin and can gradually descend," said Prof Suzuki.

"The technology from paper planes could be applied in the development of new transport craft."

One problem is there will be no telling where the paper plane will land, assuming it does survive. "It's going to be the space version of a message in a bottle. It will be great if someone picks one up," Prof Suzuki said.

"We hope the space station crew will write a message of peace on the plane before they launch it. And we are thinking of writing messages on the planes saying 'if found, please contact us' in a couple of languages."

Ella Atkins, a professor of aerospace engineering at Michigan University, said the project sounded feasible and could have serious applications in future space missions.

"It's not going to take humans anywhere or heave supplies or robots to explore other planets, but I could see it taking sensors or a small camera into the atmosphere," she said.

She said Prof Suzuki was well respected. "He has the background to test this kind of thing," she added.

However Professor Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist behind the ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars lander project, said: "It's not 1 April, is it? It's got to come down at about 17,000mph because the space station is orbiting the Earth at that speed.

"When it re-enters the atmosphere it is going to be going pretty fast and 17,000mph is a lot of speed to dissipate. That means there will be a lot of heating.

"I don't see how it works. It would have to come down so very gradually, it would have to de-orbit over many, many orbits."

Mark Bolitho, general secretary of the British Origami Society, said: "It will be the longest flight of a paper airplane ever, by virtue of being in space, I suspect."

COLLISION WITH FUTURE

THE Large Hadron Collider, due to come on stream this year, could be the world's first time machine, two Russian scientists say.

Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich calculate it is possible the machine will tear a hole in the fabric of space and time, creating a gateway to tomorrow.

And people from the future might even be able to walk through it.

The collider has been built at Cern, the particle physics centre near Geneva.