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Russian crowdfunded reflector satellite aims to be “brightest star in the sky”
- fougerejo 11y agoBut, why?
- zo1 11y agoThis is a smaller version of this: " Znamya was an experiment in orbital lighting—using orbiting mirrors to light parts of the earth (or even entire cities) at night with reflected sunlight. The idea behind the program was that a collection of orbiting mirrors could be used to extend the length of daylight hours for harvests, major construction projects, and disaster response operations, a concept originally concocted by German space theorist Hermann Oberth (one of the fathers of modern rocketry) in the 1920s "
- mhugo 11y agoI guess because the Earth is still not warm enough ...
- BenRRR 11y agoWe should be doing the opposite. Engineering and deploying ultra-light weight material that unfolds into massive solar sails that can be controlled carefully to cast a shadow and cool the earth slowly over the course of decades to counteract some of the effects of global warming.
- chippy 11y agoFrom the Russian site, googletranslated: " This space satellite, which will be the brightest star in the night sky. Star, which will remind the world who was the first in space and show that the contribution to space exploration can contribute not only to the state and corporations. "
- jimhefferon 11y agoSo it is visual pollution.
- johansch 11y agoI just puked. Good thing this is a russian kickstarter thing - with 95% probability it is a fraud.
- timthelion 11y agoThe idea expressed at the end of the article "orbiting mirrors could be used to extend the length of daylight hours for harvests" actually sounds like it could be very reasonable. Vertical farming and aquaponics is currently restricted by light to a large extent. If this solves the lighting problem for vertical farming, we could end up with a 10000 layer farm built into an old mine quary that could feed a large country. And then all of that farm land could be left to nature :) Deforestation could be reversed, and the reversal of deforestation could play a key roll in reducing the roll of carbon emissions...
- pjc50 11y agoA satellite doesn't help you with vertical farming at all, as the light is still coming down from above.
- timthelion 11y agoYou can move light. Light flies really fast [citation needed] and is easilly and efficiently reflected.
- jstanley 11y agoHow are you going to reflect it into 10000 layers? Your mirror surface area needs to be as big as the area of light you want to capture, and it all needs to be in clear view of the satellite. You may as well just remove the mirrors and put the farms where the mirrors are.
- timthelion 11y agoIf you do farming in space, you have many problems. You have to get the food down, and water up, you have to bring up all sorts of materials and store them in space... It is much easier to get light down than to get seeds and water and nutrients up, and then food back down again.
- timthelion 11y ago
- blaze33 11y agoI stumbled upon this article the other day: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night-into-day http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night-in... it's about the previous Znamya experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29
- DanBC 11y agoIn the 1980s there was a proposal for something similar, a "light ring in space" from Europe. That project was decorative, a pretty object to look at. It was obviously a stupid idea and scientists did a good job of explaining why. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=european+satellite+project+reflective+ring&source=bl&ots=DIhVLIUydE&sig=3_JY39T4zy2WbY-QuJGUvrcLi7U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt7Pq2uqTLAhVMDxoKHTluDQYQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=european%20satellite%20project%20reflective%20ring&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg... (For fuck's sake Google. Look at that stupid hideous URL.)
- timthelion 11y ago"a sky filled with orbiting trademarks or political symbols. These billboards, perpetually overhead, from which there would be no escape on earth."
- BenRRR 11y agoWould it be feasible to deploy massive solar sails to cast a shadow and prevent solar heat from hitting the earth, so that over enough time it might reverse some of the effects of global warming?
- phpnode 11y agoIt's not feasible because of cost and political will.
- BenRRR 11y agoIt might not be as expensive as it sounds. First of all a shadow can be cast using very very light-weight material, maybe even get the mass from objects already in space. Another benefit is that it can be controlled much more carefully than other proposals that have been proposed by serious publications that involve dispersing stuff into the atmosphere itself.
- akiselev 11y ago> First of all a shadow can be cast using very very light-weight material Not in space. Unless the material is an absolutely perfect reflector across the entire EM spectrum, which simply isn't possible, any structure would melt pretty much instantly. You'd have to make radiators that are as big or bigger than the shade structure in order to radiate that heat away and you'd have to make the entire structure much bigger than the shade part because otherwise you'd just be radiating the absorbed heat back at the Earth.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago> perfect reflector across the entire EM spectrum, which simply isn't possible You don't need it to be a perfect reflector across the entire spectrum, 200 to 2000 nm is enough. And according to "Solar Absorptance and Thermal Emittance of Some Common Spacecraft Thermal-Control Coatings", e.g. Kapton film reflects 92% of the entire solar spectrum.
- d_theorist 11y agoThis reminds me of a sci-fi book that I cannot remember the name of, in which the Coca Cola company deliberately initiates the supernovae of 100+ stars in order to spell out the message "COKE ADDS LIFE!" in the night sky.
- DanBC 11y ago> In the Red Dwarf (1988-current) spinoff novel Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) by Grant Naylor, stars are deliberately detonated to create a pattern of supernovae spelling out a Coke ad in Earth's sky. This page has a bunch of similar examples: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/advertising http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/advertising
- gjm11 11y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising it was "a Red Dwarf novel". The page doesn't say which one, but a bit of googling suggests it may have been Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.
- d_theorist 11y agoHow embarrassing for me :) For some reason I was half convinced it was HGTTG. Probably because I read them at about the same time, when I was about 10.
- david-given 11y agoHeinlein's _The Man Who Sold The Moon_ has the main character extort money from basically everyone by telling them that their rivals were planning on drawing a logo on the moon. He either names Coca-Cola explicitly, or else uses an expy of them...
- jlebrech 11y agoso the first piece of ringworld?
- aaron695 11y agoI guess the next step would be to crowdfund a rocket to remove this light pollution/ad?
- DanBC 11y agoWho'd risk Kessler Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- obsurveyor 11y agoYou don't have to necessarily explode it, just de-orbit it. If you're going to hit it ballistically, then you've already got the capability to de-orbit without risk of cascade.
- elbigbad 11y agoThis is beyond the scope of my knowledge so maybe it's a stupid question, but why doesn't space debris deorbit on its own like anything else not in geostationary orbit?
- Zikes 11y agoFrom the wikipedia entry: > Orbital decay is much slower at altitudes where atmospheric drag is insignificant. Slight atmospheric drag, lunar perturbation, and solar wind drag can gradually bring debris down to lower altitudes where fragments finally reenter, but this process can take millennia at very high altitudes.
- panzagl 11y agoThe US's latest anti-satellite test struck from higher altitude than the target, aiming the debris field toward the atmosphere where it quickly de-orbited.
- jevinskie 11y agoI hadn't heard that part of the story before. I found a source. [0] Sounds like the strategy wasn't super successful. Impressive ballistics though! [0]: http://swfound.org/media/167224/through_a_glass_darkly_march2014.pdf http://swfound.org/media/167224/through_a_glass_darkly_march...
- xlm1717 11y agoI hope this idea literally never gets off the ground. If one person/company gets approval to go ahead, there will be no end to the people/companies seeking approval, and there goes ground-based astronomy.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoYeah we don't need Russian "taste" in space. As someone who's traveled there, they have very different ideas on whats socially acceptable. Big ads/lights in the sky might be fine there, but certainly not everywhere. This is the kind of thing we should all be fighting against, not encouraging with "me too" upvotes on social media. This is simply space graffiti. The commercialization of space should not mean the ad-ification of space. As launch prices drop, I think we'll see more of these shenanigans. This really should be stopped now.
- scrupulusalbion 11y ago>This really should be stopped now. Sure, stopping this instance is possibly worth the trouble, but what about next time? Amateur satellites are already possible, thus the possibility of an ever increasing occurrence of space graffiti. The first issue is how one can stop space graffiti entirely. Should the UN get involved? Should NATO get involved? In any case, it would either be a statutory matter (pass a law against however-defined graffiti in space) or a military matter (use generally expensive anti-satellite missiles or lasers). The means to stop space graffiti seems to be rather expensive and politically charged/dependent. (for reference, I am not assuming that you want to do anything in particular, but I bring up criminalization of and shooting down space graffiti just to get on with my point.) The second issue is what harm is cause by space graffiti. Sure, unaware astronomers would be at least annoyed. Do they deserve a natural night sky to make their jobs easier? Space graffiti seems like art to me, but space debris seems the more serious possible problem. Since this specific instance of space graffiti seems to have planned for that, I think that harm is not a problem herewith. The third issue is whether anyone is obliged to not put astronomically obnoxious objects in orbit around earth; is this the same kind of "don't do" as assault or vandalism? If this specific instance of space graffiti were launched without public awareness, then astronomers might find this space art to be a problem, but I think that astronomers are probably watching news outlets for these sort of launches. Anything on the other side of the space graffiti is not un-see-able, but is that reason enough to either criminalize or shoot down space graffiti. Does anyone deserve the night sky to contain only natural light sources, but also a few super-useful objects (e.g. GPS satellites)? I bring all this up, because I hope to demonstrate that space graffiti, as stupid as it may be, is a very limited problem. It seems that the stupidity associated with a problem makes the problem seem bigger; ask anyone who has seen prank videos on YouTube whether the government should try to stop pranks. Graffiti on earth is often vandalism and art, yet nobody owns space so space graffiti cannot be vandalism but is still some sort of art.
- floatrock 11y agoTechnically, isn't the sun the "brightest star in the sky"?
- mfoy_ 11y agoNot at night!
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoWith a solar cell and a tether, it could stay up forever?
- cbanek 11y agoHas anyone thought of the impact this might have on earth based observations? We already have Iridium flares that happen from shiny satellite parts, and these flares have disturbed observations from various observatories (and this wasn't even intentional). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare
- mlonkibjuyhv 11y agoWe need a kickstarter to bring this thing down if it's ever launched.
- fred_is_fred 11y agoThe "Russian moon" has been an on again off again urban legend/hoax for probably 50 years. Don't fall for it again.