Let There Be Light

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