Examination of Deployment Performance of Super-Tether in Inverse-Origami Method

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26420817
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Aerospace engineering
• Research Institution: TMIT & Co.,Ltd. (Research Center) (2015-2016); Kanagawa Institute of Technology (2014)
• Principal Investigator: FUJII Hironori 株式会社TMIT(研究開発部), 研究開発部, 教授(移行) (30070650)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: スーパーテザー / 観測ロケット / 宇宙デブリ / 逆オリガミ法 / 宇宙テザー伸展

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Super tether is a bare electrodynamic tape tether which has greater anti-debris features and higher electron collection characteristics than conventional tethers used in space. The super tether is thus expected to play an important roles in both space debris mitigation and space structures construction. The space flight experiment of bare electrodynamic tape tether technology was conducted on the S520-25 sounding rocket launched on August 2010 and successfully deployed 132.6 m of tape tether in 120 seconds during its ballistic flight. This paper reports results of post-flight experimental studies on the folded tape deployment in the Inverse-Origami method. These studies include results of a variety of examinations for deploying drag of the super tether. Insight in the deployment behavior of the super tether is obtained as the results including a suggestion that the vacancy of boxes holding long flexible tether can affect significantly on the deployment performance of the super tether.

Free Research Field

宇宙航行力学