This summer, NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plan to launch the world’s first wooden satellite, called LignoSat. The project aims to reduce the harmful impact of space debris—old rocket parts, broken satellites, and even tools dropped by astronauts—left orbiting in space around Earth.
Eventually, most space debris falls back to Earth, burning up as it reenters the planet’s atmosphere. One benefit of wooden satellites is that they would burn up almost completely, unlike traditional metal satellites. Metal satellites also leave behind metallic particles in the atmosphere. These particles could damage the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that acts as a shield to absorb most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays.
Compared with metal satellites, wooden ones are also cheaper and easier to produce, says Koji Murata, a materials scientist at Kyoto University who helped develop LignoSat. If LignoSat functions as well as its metal counterparts, more wooden satellites may be launched in the future.