Should they simply give up? Curse the earthquake or typhoon, or the space agency that sent them to Mars? Or should they take inspiration from an ancient Japanese art of paper-folding to 3D-print all their solutions on-site?

If you ask Akib Zaman, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of "One String to Pull Them All: Fast Assembly of Curved Structures from Flat Auxetic Linkages," he's going to tell you to go with origami.

Well, correction: he'll explain that the method he as his co-authors developed doesn't work like origami (which involves nothing but paper), but like kirigami, which can include cutting and gluing (or in this case, attached string), to produce auxetic devices – that is, structures that thicken when stretched and thin when compressed.