Japan is going to launch the world’s first wooden satellite to help combat space trash. Yes, a sustainable satellite. That’s as long as we can maintain our planet to grow the wood, but hey, that’s another post.
For some background on why wood was used, here is more from Smithsonian Magazine:
In 2020, a team of Japanese researchers launched the LignoStella Space Wood Project to test the durability of three different types of wood in space: Erman’s birch, Japanese cherry and magnolia bovate. They subjected the samples to exposure tests for more than 290 days on the International Space Station before returning them to Earth earlier this year. The team’s analysis found that despite the harsh conditions of space, the wood samples had no measurable changes in mass and showed no signs of decomposition or damage.
“When you use wood on Earth, you have the problems of burning, rotting and deformation, but in space, you don’t have those problems: There is no oxygen in space, so it doesn’t burn, and no living creatures live in them, so they don’t rot,” Koji Murata, a researcher at Kyoto University, tells CNN’s Rebecca Cairns.
Wood may also prove to be an advantageous satellite material choice because electromagnetic waves can penetrate through it, meaning components like antennae could be held inside the satellite body instead of sticking out of it, simplifying the design.
Upon re-entry the wood satellite, unlike say a fictional toilet seat from the MIR space station, will burn up and “will produce only a fine spray of biodegradable ash.” Satellites now burn up aluminum upon re-entry leaving a deposit of particles which may cause serious depletion of the ozone layer. If successful, the wood satellite could fix all this. This just made our inner nerd happy reading about this.
Oh, and your chances of getting hit by space trash, like said toilet seat above, is a bit below the 1 in 10,000 threshold — by a re-entering rocket body alone.
