KYOTO, Japan — The world’s first wooden satellite, built by Japanese researchers, was launched into space Tuesday in a first test of using wood in lunar and martian exploration.

LignoSat, developed by Kyoto University and a homebuilder Sumitomo Forestrywill be transported to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission then put into orbit about 250 miles above Earth.

Named after the Latin word for “wood,” the palm-sized LignoSat is tasked with demonstrating the cosmic potential of renewable materials as humans explore life in space.

“With wood, a material that we can produce ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever,” said Takao Doian astronaut who flew 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 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 during reentry, but wooden ones would 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.”

After a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station, researchers discovered that hinoki, a type of magnolia native to Japan and traditionally used for sword sheaths, was best suited for spacecraft.

LignoSat is made of hinoki, using a traditional Japanese artisanal 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. »