While styles of origami can be incredibly diverse, the art is rooted in mathematical principles that make it applicable to science and industry.
The ability to fold two-dimensional structures into complex, yet compact three-dimensional shapes is especially valuable to space sciences and missions, where it pays to keep payloads small.
Panel arrays on satellites must be folded down into compact forms in order to pack them into a relatively narrow rocket, and only unfurled to form large flat surfaces once the rocket has blasted into outer space. It’s thought that the first origami solar array was packed into a Japanese spacecraft that launched in 1995. This was accomplished using the Miura fold, which is a method of folding a flat surface into a smaller area and named after astrophysicist Koryo Miura. A form of rigid origami, where a material only bends at pre-specified fold lines, the crease patterns of the Miura fold form a tessellation of the surface...