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

LignoSat, developed by Kyoto University and manufacturer Sumitomo Forestry, will fly to the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission and later be released into an orbit about 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth.

Named after the Latin word for “wood”, it is about the size of a palm. LignoSat is on a mission to demonstrate the cosmic potential of 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 has flown on the Space Shuttle and studies the human space activities at Kyoto University.

With a 50-year plan to plant trees and build wooden houses on the moon and Mars, the Doi team decided to develop a NASA-certified wooden satellite to prove that wood is a space material.

“The first airplanes in the 1900s were made of wood,” said Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata. “A wooden satellite might also have been possible.”

According to CNN, wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there is no water or oxygen to rot, Murata added.

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

Decommissioned satellites must be re-entered the atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk. Conventional metal satellites create aluminum oxide particles on re-entry, but wooden ones would burn with less pollution, Doi said.

Industrial application

Researchers have found hinoki, a type of magnolia tree native to Japan to be the most suitable for spacecraft, after a 10-month experiment on the International Space Station.

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

LignoSat will remain in orbit for six months, with onboard electronics measuring how the wood holds up in the extreme space environment, where temperatures range from -100 to 100 degrees Celsius (-148 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit) every 45 minutes while rotating from darkness to sunlight.

LignoSat will also measure wood’s ability to reduce the effect of space radiation on semiconductors, making it useful for applications such as building data centers, said Kenji Kariya, director at the Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute.

“It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting edge technology as civilization heads for the moon and Mars,” he said. “Expansion into space could boost timber industry.”

* External Stock Photo