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Japan prepares to launch “the strangest satellite in the world”
Japanese scientists have created the world’s first ‘wooden’ satellite, in what has been described as one of the ‘world’s most unusual spacecraft’ and aims to reduce harmful pollution caused by the space industry. Japanese scientists replaced aluminum with wood in their new design. The LignoSat satellite was made of magnolia wood, which was found, in experiments conducted on the International Space Station (ISS), to be particularly stable and resistant to cracking. Plans are now being finalized to launch it on a US rocket this summer. A team from Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry Company designed the wooden satellite, which will be roughly the size of a cup, in order to test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they could serve as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently made. Takao Doi, a Japanese astronaut and aerospace engineer at Kyoto University, recently warned that “all satellites entering the Earth’s atmosphere burn up and produce small particles of alumina, which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years. Ultimately, this will affect the environment.” the earth”. To address this problem, researchers in Kyoto created a project to evaluate wood species to determine their ability to withstand the rigors of space launches and long journeys in Earth orbit.
