Transcriber: Yifat Adler Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning.
What a great privilege it is to be here today.
What I hope that you take away from my presentation
is that inspiration can come from anywhere.
No matter what field do you work in,
you can find inspiration in some of the most unexpected of places.
When I was five years old,
my older sister brought home a poster of the Moon from school.
I was fascinated by it.
I wanted to go there.
In fact, from five all the way through high school,
I wanted to be an astronaut.
It was my goal to be the first woman on the Moon.
And my life plan has been a little bit different since high school,
but this project that I'm working on now
has given me the opportunity to fulfill that childhood dream
and to enjoy that excitement of space exploration.
So, let me tell you a little about Hannaflex.
Hannaflex is a solar array that would wrap around a spacecraft
and be used to power either that spacecraft
or to provide energy as a clean energy source for Earth.
We call it Hannaflex because Hanna means 'flower' in Japanese,
and of course origami is the Japanese art of paper folding.
And as you can see, as it enfolds, it kind of looks like a flower.
The solar panels that are on the solar array
work much like the solar panels you might see on a house
in areas of high sun.
These solar panels collect energy from the Sun,
convert it into electricity,
and that's used, in this case, to heat their pool.
In our case, we might use these solar panels
to enable missions to Mars
or beam energy back to Earth by microwave radiation.
The possibilities are really endless.
I grew up loving space and wanting to explore it,
but I know that's not everyone's dream.
Although I'm willing to bet that there are several people out there
who did want to be an astronaut at some point during their childhood.
Yes, yes, OK, great.
Regardless of what your childhood aspirations might have been,
the technologies that come out of space exploration,
really benefit our lives here on Earth.
I'll give you a few examples.
First, the health field is full of examples
of what we call spin-off technologies.
These are things that have been developed
because of the research done to push the boundaries
of science and technology for space exploration.
So, even though my inner child
is really excited about this idea of space exploration,
I also get to fulfill a little bit of a higher dream
of helping make the world a better place.
What about memory from mattresses and pillows?
That came out of NASA research as well.
As did things like the Nerf Super Soaker, invisible braces,
scratch-resistant lenses, and even in-ear thermometers.
These are just a few of the many examples of things that we might not have
if not for space exploration.
From 1969 to 1972 this was a really exciting time for space exploration,
especially human exploration of space.
We put six successful missions on the Moon,
earning 12 men the enviable distinction of having walked on the Moon.
The prospect of space travel was really exciting then,
for about those four years.
But today,
about the furthest you can travel is the International Space Station,
which is still really cool, but it's in low-Earth orbit,
which is only about 200 miles above the Earth.
And even then, these days,
we have to go all the way to Russia just to catch a ride.
So, we've stalled in our human exploration of space.
We are sending rovers to Mars,
but how far away are we from sending manned missions?
And what are the limitations that keep that from happening?
One of those big limitations is power.
Just to get from Earth to Mars, it's an eight-month journey at a minimum.
And when we send a rover,
we don't have to keep a lot of power during the flight.
They don't breath, and they don't care if there are lights on or not.
But if we're sending people then that becomes a bigger concern.
So we need ways to provide power or electricity
for this eight-month journey
for people that are traveling to Mars or other planets.
Another great example are the Voyager spacecrafts.
Voyager 1 and 2 were both launched in 1977 and they are still traveling in space.
In fact, they are reaching the edge of our Solar System now.
These two with their 37 years in space, longer than I've even been alive,
hold the record now for the longest missions
that NASA has been able to support.
However, they are powered by nuclear energy,
which is a great thing,
except that it's going to run out in about five years.
So, we won't receive any more information back from them.
But, if we were able to incorporate these really large solar arrays,
especially if that was included with a nuclear energy source,
then perhaps we could design a mission that had a 50 or 100 year lifetime.
And who knows what we might learn then.
But to do that, we need to figure out how we're going to fit
these ever larger solar arrays into the rockets
that we'll launch then into space.
Well, Hannaflex is a great solution.
Here, we've used principles of origami, this artistic means of expressing oneself,
to create an array that can fold up in a way
that we'll fit inside of the rockets.
We started, of course, in paper,
because origami is naturally a paper model,
and when you fold origami
your patterns are assuming a zero thickness material.
Paper is thin enough that that usually works.
Although, if you've ever tried to fold a paper
I think it's after seven times, you can't fold it in half anymore.
You realize that even with very thin substances
thickness becomes an issue.
Especially when we're folding something like solar panels.
You can imagine folding a sheet of iPads.
You have these things that are brittle, that aren't flexible,
unless maybe it's the iPhone 6+
(Laughter)
and can easily crack.
So, we have to find a way to accommodate for thickness and for that inflexibility.
We therefore collaborated with an origami mathematician
to modify the folding pattern
- the original folding pattern shown on the left,
which maybe doesn't show up super well, but it's just straight lines basically -
we modified that so we could accommodate for thickness,
and that is shown on the right.
And you see this piecewise curvature,
which means, when the model is all folded up
there's a discrete distance specified between subsequent layers of panels,
so we can essentially fold these sheets of iPads.
This example isn't actually a manned spacecraft,
but to illustrate why it might be important to have these larger arrays,
let's assume that this spacecraft can support one person.
So, we've got four, little solar panels on there.
It can support one human aboard the spacecraft.
If we want to send more people, or for a longer amount of time,
then we need to increase the amount of solar arrays that are on there.
But just adding--
- this was really easy because I did it on Photoshop -
but just adding a couple of extra panels can be costly.
In fact, the International Space Station sent up
eight solar arrays on the station,
but they sent those up in several different launches.
And each launch costs 10,000 dollars per pound
to launch something into space.
So, we want to send it up as compactly as we can.
And that brings us
to some of the unique benefits of the Hannaflex design.
You can see how it kind of wraps around the central hub.
And that central hub could, in fact, be the spacecraft itself,
which becomes
a real convenient way to avoid wasting space,
because any volume that would have been empty
in that folded pattern is now occupied by the spacecraft itself.
A second aspect of this folding pattern that's really unique:
we start off with a flat sheet when it's deployed,
but during its launch state it's folded up.
And you can see that the panels start to rotate
and come up vertical against the sides of the spacecraft.
But, also, we have something
that no other folding pattern or solar array at least currently has,
and that's that we can fix the height when it's folded closed.
You can see here a video of how it folds closed
- I'll explain a little bit more about what that fixed height is -
but we're going to put this inside of a rocket,
and it has a fixed volume of space,
and, so, the fact that we can constrain our height
and continue to grow the array becomes really convenient.
So, here is an example of the rocket we might launch this in.
Right here, the second triangle that begins,
that's what we call our second ring of the pattern.
And with this folding pattern, we can actually add additional rings,
so we can continue to increase our deployed size,
or we're only minimally increasing the stowed diameter,
and our height isn't changing at all.
So, that fixed volume that we have in our launched vehicle or our rocket,
we can maintain within those parameters.
There's another great-- - and I alluded to it before -
another big limitation of space travel is cost.
If it's going to cost 10,000 dollars per pound,
then we've got to do these things as compact and lightweight as possible.
And origami provides us some great solutions for achieving that.
Solar panels are one possible way where we might apply origami,
but another one that I'll tell you about is a solar sail.
We call it a solar sail
because it's a lot like a sail on a sailboat.
The solar sails are using solar radiation pressure,
and this force, just from the radiation of the sun rays;
we can't feel it here, because it's a really small force,
but in space if we can put up
a large enough sheet, a large enough sail,
then we can use that
as an essentially free and infinite propulsion source.
So, the idea would be to fold up as large an array or sail as we can,
and then use this to travel perhaps beyond the Solar System
because the solar radiation pressure provides a constant acceleration.
So, we can continue going forever.
Because we want it to be lightweight in our launch vehicle,
we want to use a thin material,
and a great candidate material for this is Mylar, which is the same stuff
that those silver birthday balloons are made from.
So, we'd take this big sheet of silver birthday balloon material,
fold it up as small as possible, stick it inside our rocket,
and launch it into space.
What we've designed so far, would fold up smaller than a tissue box,
but open up to about half the size of a basketball court,
which is a pretty good ratio of stowed to deployed diameter.
But that's just the beginning.
Our objective is to eventually fly our solar sail
with one kilometer square sails,
which is a little larger than Atlanta's Piedmont Park.
So, big.
Things like solar sails maybe can take us beyond our Solar System,
and maybe this solar array concept can be used as a clean energy source
for us here on Earth.
And those ideas might sound a little bit science-fictiony,
but the work that goes into turning that fantasy into reality
really has benefits for us here on Earth.
And that's what's exciting for me.
Even now when I look up at the night sky, I am amazed by the immensity of space.
And it's not just about being able to identify stars, planets, or galaxies.
It's recognizing that we are just a pinprick in the fabric of the Universe.
And there is so much out there to explore, and discover, and learn.
And it's my hope that each of us, in our own individual journeys,
will recognize the little bits of inspiration
that will help us change the world
whether that's through origami or something else.
And not just for space travel
- although, I'm still half-hoping to be the first woman on the Moon -
but in whatever our respective fields are.
Thank you.
(Applause)