The world’s first wooden satellite, built by Japanese researchers, was launched into space on Tuesday (5), in an initial test of the use of wood in lunar and Martian exploration.
LignoSat, developed by Kyoto University and construction company Sumitomo Forestry, will be transported to the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission, and later released into orbit approximately 400 kilometers above Earth.
Named after the Latin word for “wood,” the palm-sized LignoSat is on a mission to demonstrate the cosmic potential of this renewable material as humans explore life in space.
“With wood, a material we can produce ourselves, we will be able to build houses and live and work in space forever,” said Takao Doi, an astronaut who has flown on the Space Shuttle and studies human space activities at Kyoto University. .
With a 50-year plan to plant trees and build wooden houses on the Moon and Mars, Doi’s team decided to develop a NASA-certified wooden satellite to prove that wood is a suitable material for space.
“Airplanes in the early 1900s were made of wood,” said Kyoto University forestry science professor Koji Murata. “A wooden satellite should also be viable.”
Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there is no water or oxygen to rot or ignite it, Murata added. A wooden satellite also minimizes environmental impact at the end of its useful life, researchers say. Decommissioned satellites must re-enter the atmosphere to avoid becoming space debris. Conventional metal satellites create aluminum oxide particles during reentry, but wooden ones would simply burn with less pollution, Doi said.
“Metal satellites may be banned in the future,” Doi said. “If we can prove that our first wooden satellite works, we want to present it to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.”
Industrial application
Researchers discovered that honoki, a species of magnolia native to Japan and traditionally used for sword sheaths, is best suited for spacecraft, after a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station. LignoSat is made from honoki, using a traditional Japanese craftsmanship technique without screws or glue.
Once deployed, LignoSat will remain in orbit for six months, with onboard electronics measuring how wood withstands the extreme environment of space, where temperatures fluctuate from -100 to 100 degrees Celsius every 45 minutes as it orbits from darkness to sunlight.
LignoSat will also measure wood’s ability to reduce the impact of space radiation on semiconductors, making it useful for applications such as building data centers, said Kenji Kariya, manager of Sumitomo Forestry’s Tsukuba Research Institute.
“It may seem outdated, but wood is actually a cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the Moon and Mars,” he said. “Expanding into space could reinvigorate the timber industry.”
This content was originally published in First wooden satellite goes into space on a SpaceX rocket on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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