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- technology
The environmentally friendly LignaSat probe – set to orbit this summer – has been created to combat harmful aluminium particles
Japanese scientists have created one of the world’s most unusual spacecraft – a tiny satellite that is made of timber.
The LignoSat probe has been built of magnolia wood, which, in experiments carried out on the International Space Station (ISS), was found to be particularly stable and resistant to cracking. Now plans are being finalised for it to be launched on a US rocket this summer.
The timber satellite has been built by researchers at Kyoto University and the logging company Sumitomo Forestry in order to test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they can act as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently constructed.
Satellites all eventually come back down though. I think they’re hoping for satellites that when they come down and burn up, less expensive and wasteful materials are lost.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to just implement some kind of recycling of old satellites rather than letting them burn up at all. Making them out of wood doesn’t seem like a good solution.
In the long term, if we become a proper space faring civilization, yeah we’ll want to recapture satellites at the end of their life span rather than de-orbiting them. Not only do you save them from burning up but you get to reuse the mass that you already spent a bunch of energy getting up there. However, at this stage i don’t think we really have the facilities up there to deal with that.