The world's first wooden satellite has been launched into space. Video

The world's first wooden satellite created by Japanese researchers was launched into space. The event took place as part of an early test of the use of wood in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

The LignoSat satellite was developed by the University of Kyoto and the construction company Sumitomo Forestry. It will be delivered to the International Space Station as part of the SpaceX mission and later launched into orbit about 400 km above the Earth, Reuters reports.

The LignoSat is the size of a palm and is named after the Latin word for "tree". Its main task is to demonstrate the space potential of renewable material as people explore life in space.

"With wood, a material we can produce ourselves, we can build houses, live and work in space forever," says Takao Doi, an 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 space-ready material.

"Airplanes of the early 1900s were made of wood. A wooden satellite should also be possible. In space, wood is more durable than on Earth because there is no water or oxygen to cause it to rot or ignite," commented Koji Murata, a professor of forestry at Kyoto University.

The researchers say that the wooden satellite also minimizes the environmental impact at the end of its service life. Decommissioned satellites must re-enter the atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk. Conventional metal satellites create aluminum oxide particles during re-entry, but wooden ones will simply burn up with less pollution.

"Metal satellites may be banned in the future. If we can prove that our first wooden satellite works, we want to hand it over to Elon Musk's SpaceX," Doi said.

The LignoSat will remain in orbit for six months, and electronic components on board will measure how the wood withstands the extreme conditions of the space environment, where temperatures fluctuate from -100 to 100 degrees Celsius every 45 minutes as it rotates from darkness to sunlight.

"LignoSat will also evaluate wood's ability to reduce the effects of cosmic radiation on semiconductors, making it useful for applications such as data center construction. It may seem outdated, but wood is actually a cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the Moon and Mars," said Kenji Kariya, manager of Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute.

The satellite was developed from magnolia wood because of its durability and suitability for work. As previously reported by OBOZ.UA, this was decided after space tests conducted on cherry, birch and magnolia chips. The wood was obtained from the forest of Sumitomo Forestry.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA reported that scientists predicted a large-scale environmental crisis due to rocket launches and satellites that burn up in the atmosphere.

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