Japan developing wooden satellites to cut space junk

bbc.co.uk

17 points·lnguyen··8 comments

the nose fairing -- which protects the warheads and the post-boost vehicle during ascent -- on the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles is made from some beautiful Sitka spruce (and some glass, but it's mostly wood).

This will not solve the "space junk" problem as the title claim. A piece of wood traveling in space at a huge speed would break any other satellite it hits, and wood does not rot in space and just dissapear.

This potentially solves (partially) the problem of pieces of satellites surviving the reentry after they are out of use.

Think it’s a re-entry issue

From first paragraph

"We are very concerned with the fact that all the satellites which re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years," Takao Doi, a professor at Kyoto University and Japanese astronaut, told the BBC.

There’s a large amount of micrometeorites that burn up everyday, I would have thought that would be more than satellites burning up.

Come on... am i the only one who gets a steampunk vibe out of this? ;-)

More like solarpunk to me.

how do satelite companies ensure there's no debris in each satelite's spot in space before launch ?

The US monitor a lot of the tiny chunks flying around and predicts where they go. Worst case the satellite has to flight an evasive maneuver. Usually it's a false alarm, but we can't measure well enough to make perfect predictions.

I think they do it with radar right now and the future cloud would be lasers, especially for more accurate measures of things already flagged as dangerous. I might mix things up here though.

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