Kyoto:

The world’s first wooden satellite, built by Japanese researchers, was launched into space on Tuesday, in a first test of using wood for the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

LignoSat, developed by Kyoto University and homebuilder Sumitomo Forestry, will be flown to the International Space Station as part of a SpaceX mission, then put into orbit about 400 km (250 miles) above of the Earth.

READ | LignoSat: Japan launches the world’s first wooden satellite to combat space debris

Named after the Latin word for “wood,” the palm-sized LignoSat’s mission is 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, live and work in space forever,” said Takao Doi, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle and is studying 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 material of spatial quality.

“Airplanes in the early 1900s were made of wood,” said Koji Murata, a forestry science professor at Kyoto University. “A wooden satellite should also be feasible.”

Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there is no water or oxygen that could rot or ignite it, Murata added.

A wooden satellite also minimizes its environmental impact at the end of its life, researchers say.

Decommissioned satellites must re-enter the atmosphere to avoid becoming space debris. Conventional metal satellites create aluminum oxide particles upon re-entry, 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 type of magnolia native to Japan and traditionally used for sword sheaths, was most suitable for spacecraft, after a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station.

LignoSat is made of honoki, using a traditional Japanese craft technique, without screws or glue.

Once deployed, LignoSat will remain in orbit for six months, with onboard electronics measuring how well wood copes with 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 evaluate 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, director of the Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute. .

“It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the Moon and Mars,” he said. “Expanding into space could reinvigorate the timber industry.”

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