Forget about the
argument over how much of the year should be on Daylight Savings Time, how
would you like there to be daylight at all hours of the night? A giant space
mirror may soon be sent into orbit to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of
the Earth.
Okay, one won’t be big
enough to light up the entire dark side of Earth, just patches of it. Reflect
Orbital, a California startup, plans to deploy and operate Earendil-1, which
would be a prototype satellite with a reflective film that’s roughly 59 feet
across.
This first test could
allow certain regions to have sunlight 24/7. They say this could have important
applications in solar energy and agriculture. Solar energy I can see, but I’m
not sure about agriculture because I am a firm believer that plants need to
rest, just like animals do.
Earendil-1 will orbit
about 625 kilometers above Earth. A motorized reflector will aim sunlight at a
designated target. The illuminated area would span at least 5 kilometers. This
one spacecraft can provide only brief illumination. A longer spot of light
would require many satellites passing in succession.
Reflect Orbital says
such beams of light could help with search-and-rescue scenes, light up disaster
zones and remote construction sites. Maybe. But would you like to be woke up
every time one of these sunlight beams wander over your house?
This is only one
spacecraft, so how disruptive could that be? Well, the company plans to have 2
satellites this year, over 5,000 by 2030, and more than 50,000 by 2035. With
that many reflectors aimed at Earth, it could be pretty disruptive, I’m
thinking. It’d be great for solar farms, but what about wildlife that couldn’t
do whatever they normally do at night? And why bother with street lights when
you could just light up the city with a few dozen mirrors. I’m betting
black-out curtains would become quite fashionable.
The Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) approved the deployment of this first mirror
but declined to require a full environmental assessment. People made comments
about wildlife that need darkness to navigate, reproduce or hunt. They also
brought up concerns about human sleep and aviation. The FCC thought those
claims were not a worry for one satellite. They declined to consider the
ramifications of a hypothetical fleet.
The main critics are
astronomers, who have serious concerns. A mirror could appear as a bright
moving object, which would leave streaks across telescope images. That
reflected light would also be scattered through the atmosphere.
A recent European
Southern Observatory study found that, with 50,000 reflecting mirrors, every
exposure from an observatory’s wide-field camera would be lost whenever the
mirrors were sunlit. They also calculated the full fleet would make the night
sky 3 to 4 times brighter, even if individual beams were not pointed near
observatories.
The FCC received more
than 1,800 comments objecting to the proposal. Some of them were from
astronomists and dark-sky groups. But the agency’s authority centers on
satellite communications and radio frequencies. Therefore, they could not
consider those comments.
Mirrors have been sent
into orbit before. Russia deployed Znamya 2, a 20-meter reflector in 1993. It
cast a five-kilometer patch of light that raced over the ground of Europe at 8
kilometers per second. The entire thing lasted a few minutes. In 1999, a larger
follow-up mirror snagged on an antenna during deployment. Naturally, that ended
the experiment.
NASA projects that
reflecting sunlight is possible but controlling it and making it useful is
harder.
One thing that wasn’t
mentioned in the article is how much heat is going to be reflected to Earth
with the sunlight? The planet is already overheated, as evidenced by the
droughts and severe heat waves we are experiencing. We don’t need more heat
being added to the atmosphere and ground during the night, when the planet is
supposed to be cooling off.
We also don’t need
another 50,000 satellites clogging up the near-Earth space. It already looks
like rush-hour traffic out there. This takes a toll on astronomy projects, too.
Okay, I can’t stop them
from sending up a prototype. But I hope it fails miserably. Everything living
on Earth is used to having a day/night cycle.
If a company just HAS
to put satellites in orbit, they should do something to make it up to the
astronomers who are trying to understand our universe. Like build a new space
telescope and send it out beyond the ring of satellites that already circle our
globe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-us-cleared-a-giant-space-mirror-to-shine-sunlight-after-dark-and-turn-night-into-day/ar-AA27Ujht?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=a8cf5b2a94754b05938e873ab337a5e0&ei=37
