Thursday, July 2, 2015

Meteor Shower for your family celebrations!

Fancy a meteor shower racing across the night sky to mark your birthday? One
Japanese start-up is hoping to deliver shooting stars on demand and choreograph the cosmos.
And, say scientists, it's not just about painting huge pictures on the night-sky that would be visible to millions of people; artificial meteors could help us to understand a lot more about Earth's atmosphere.
Lena Okajima, who holds a doctorate in astronomy, says her company -ALE -is intending to launch a micro satellite that can eject shooting stars at exactly the right time and place to put on a celestial show.
“I'm thinking of streams of meteors that are rare in nature,“ Okajima said.
“It is artificial but I want to make really beautiful ones that can impress viewers,“ she said.
In collaboration with scientists and engineers at Japanese universities, the ALE team is developing a satellite that will orbit the Earth and eject dozens of balls, a few centimetres in diameter, at a time.
These balls -whose chemical formula is a closely-guarded secret -will race through the atmosphere at around 7-8 kilometres a second, glowing brightly from the friction created by smashing into the air.
Although it sounds fast, that is considerably slower than naturally-occurring meteors, which can hurtle through the atmosphere at up to 80 kilometres a second.
Tinkering with the ingredients should mean that it is possible to change the colour of each bright streak, says Okajima, offering the possibility of a multi-coloured flotilla of shooting stars.





1 comment:

  1. Oh this would be awesome on a special occasion. Really awesome.

    Have a fabulous day. ☺

    ReplyDelete