World's first wooden satellite has been deployed

 Now, NASA says that the tiny satellite, dubbed LignoSat, was finally released into the wild last month, in an experiment that will explore the viability of using wood in space — which if fruitful, could offer a more sustainable alternative to traditional metal components.

"With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever," Takao Doi, a former JAXA astronaut who studies human space activities at Kyoto University, told Reuters last year.

LignoSat, named after the Latin word for wood, is a type of CubeSat — a small, box shaped satellite that can typically be held in one hand.

Compact as it is, it's a meticulously crafted device. It uses no screws, nails, or glue. Instead, using a Japanese woodworking technique called "sashimono," the wooden components are held together by an intricate marrying of complex joints, fashioned and assembled by master carpenters in Kyoto, per The New York Times.

The wood's source was also carefully chosen after a nearly year-long experiment aboard the ISS: honoki, a type of magnolia tree whose wood is traditionally used for sword sheaths, according to Reuters.

Moreover, using wood to construct satellites theoretically makes them safer to decommission. Right now, metal satellites are deorbited by re-entering the atmosphere, where they are supposed to burn up completely. 

But this isn't always the case, with large chunks of spacecraft often surviving and dangerously crashing down to Earth. In the long run, tiny shards and particles of metal, some of which may be toxic, can also pollute the atmosphere. With wood, though, there's no risk of dangerous debris, the scientists argue — it burns completely.

"Metal satellites might be banned in the future," Doi told Reuters. "If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk's SpaceX."

And perhaps in the distant future, offworld outposts could sustain themselves by planting their own trees, providing an endless supply of construction material.

Now that it's been deployed, the plan is for LignoSat to stay in orbit for six months. Onboard sensors will monitor how the wood weathers the conditions of space, including its extremely cold temperatures, and how well the material shields its electronic components from ever present radiation, emitted by the Sun and from deep space.