What Happens If You Throw A Paper Airplane In Space?

Admit it, there’s really just one query in your mind. It’s the identical one you first had if you were 8 years old. Sure, you may be an “adult” now with “grown-up” things to do, but when you might have a moment to yourself, your thoughts all the time return to it: What would occur in the event you threw a paper airplane in space? Fortunately, a pair of such so-called adults occur to be astronautical engineers on the University of Tokyo. And in contrast to you or me, they have not been content to only wonder. By golly, they went and came upon.

In what can only be considered the best scientific paper of all time, published in Acta Astronautica, Maximilien Berthet and Kojiro Suzuki attack the issue with probably the most serious faces possible. Using a numerical model (principally, a complicated algorithm fed right into a computer) and an honest-to-goodness wind tunnel, the pair explored what would occur if an A4 “origami space plane” were yeeted out the window of the International Space Station 250 miles above the Earth. How long wouldn’t it take the orbit to decay? Wouldn’t it immediately tip straight down, exactly like each paper airplane I’ve ever thrown? Wouldn’t it burn up on atmospheric re-entry, or crash down on Earth with tremendous impact?

We must know. For science.

The numerical model tied together all relevant science about an object moving through low-Earth orbit. Once run through a pc, it determined that the hypothetical paper space plane would dive on the Earth pretty quickly. Still, “quickly” takes a protracted time in space: it would not actually hit atmosphere until across the 80 hour mark. 80 glorious hours of a paper plane orbiting the world. If this will not be the trail to peace, I’m undecided what hope we have now.

Amazingly, the hypothetical plane also keeps pointed roughly appropriately, only nosediving suddenly and violently around that very same 80 hour point. Yes, science has mathematically estimated the angle of a paper plane in space. That trajectory should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever thrown one of their life: okay for a bit, then a horrific crash at the tip.

Trouble is, that numerical model only works above 75 miles; below that, a thicker atmosphere makes the mathematics crumble. That is where things get tactile, as our intrepid scientists made an actual paper plane, for science, to place in an actual wind tunnel, for science. And it did pretty much! Though its poor little nose bent upwards, it made it through the Mach 7 speed and 710 degrees Fahrenheit conditions, which is what you’d get upon reentry. It even made shock waves, very likely the primary paper plane to ever achieve this. That said, it did get barely singed at the perimeters. Our scientists were forced to conclude the horrible truth: a paper plane would indeed burn up in atmosphere. Pour one out.

Still, cheer up. Because the paper puts it: “Owing to the extremely low price of a paper space plane, multiple deployments might be conducted at the identical time.” Seems, some paper is cheaper than a full-blown satellite. Could vast swarms of them be launched, each of them carrying small research instruments that might collectively do some real science? Probably not, if we’re being honest! But hey, you never know until you do the work.