A wooden satellite built by Japanese researchers has launched into space. Testing the use of target wood in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.
LignoSat, developed by Kyoto University and the construction company Sumitomo Forestry, will fly to the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission, and will later be placed in an orbit about 400 kilometers above the Earth. Named after the Latin word for “wood”, the palm-sized LignoSat’s task is to demonstrate the cosmic potential inherent in renewable matter. “With wood, a material we can produce ourselves, we will forever be able to build houses, live and work in space,” said astronaut Takao Doi, who has flown the space shuttle and studies human space activities at Kyoto University. .
Doi’s team’s long-term plan is to plant trees and build wooden houses on the Moon and Mars, so they decided to develop a NASA-certified wooden satellite to prove that wood is a space material. “In the early 1900s, airplanes were made of wood,” said Koji Murata, a professor of forest sciences at Kyoto University. “A wooden satellite should be feasible.” Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there is no water or oxygen to rot or catch fire, Murata added.
According to the researchers, the wooden satellite also minimizes the environmental impact at the end of its life cycle. Decommissioned satellites must return to the atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk. Traditional metal satellites disintegrate into alumina particles during reentry, but wooden ones would just burn up, with less pollution, Doi said. “Metal satellites may be banned in the future,” Doi said. “If we can prove that our wooden satellite works, we would like to offer it to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.”
After a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station, researchers determined that the best suited for spacecraft is a type of magnolia native to Japan, called honoki, which is traditionally used for sword scabbards. LignoSat is made of honoki using traditional Japanese craftsmanship, without screws or glue. Once deployed, LignoSat will remain in orbit for six months. Meanwhile, on-board electronics will measure how the wood can withstand the extreme environment of space, where temperatures fluctuate between -100 and 100 degrees Celsius every 45 minutes, depending on whether the sun is shining or not.
LignoSat will also measure whether wood can reduce the effect of space radiation on semiconductors, which could be useful in the construction of data centers, for example, said Kenji Kariya, one of the heads of the Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute. “It may seem old-fashioned, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the moon and Mars,” he said. “Expansion into space could revitalize the wood industry.”
Source: sg.hu
