Can Satellites Light Up Entire Cities? RSC Energia is Willing to Give it a Shot
RSC Energia is offering to illuminate Arctic cities using satellites as a way to prevent polar nights. Specialists will present this report next week at the royal readings. How will this idea be implemented? We'll talk about this with my colleague, Mariya Grigorieva.
What level of illumination do they hope to achieve?
There aren't many details right now, but by the looks of it, the goal is to achieve at least 2 luxes, which is the level of street illumination at night.
The polar night comes every year for many of our countrymen. Russia has the largest polar cities. Murmansk's population is 305,000 people, Norilsk is 176,000, Vorkuta is 60,000. And all these people are forced to adapt to life without the sun. The lack of light disrupts biorhythms and is bad for health. And a lot of money is spent on street illumination. In Murmansk, electricity consumption increases by 10,000 megawatt-hours per day, that's tens of millions of rubles.
The proposed solution to this Arctic problem is using so-called "illuminator satellites." Their task is to catch and redirect sunlight onto the dark parts of the globe. The satellite discussed in the report has a mirror with a radius of 50 meters, and it is made of a 10 micrometer-thick aluminized polyamide film which has 89% reflectivity. It's not known how big of a patch of light it's capable of producing. But we have the results of the mathematical model, according to which, when the satellite is 400 km over Norilsk on a circular polar orbit, illumination can increase up to .5 Lux for a short time. This is twice as much as needed for minimum emergency lighting.
It is known that our scientists have already successfully completed an experiment to illuminate the surface of the earth in 1993, as part of the Banner-2 project. A 20-meter-wide mirror was installed on a Progress spacecraft, which created a bright spot of light 5 km in diameter. It moved at 8 km per second and was visible for 6 minutes. During this time, it passed through a number of European cities. According to German meteorologists, its brightness was comparable to that of a full moon.
Ivan Moiseev, Space politics Institute GEO: "This is essentially a repeat of the Banner experiment. That one was 20 meters, but this one is a bit bigger, so it's doable. But if it's in a low orbit, then nothing will be visible. It will just quickly pass through, like a shooting star. Even though it's bright, there's not a lot of light from it."
But it's still an interesting idea, if one will go into orbit, it will greatly help weather forecasters. I'll explain. This is how the Arctic looks like from satellites during the period of the polar night, everything above the 66th parallel north is not visible. Atmospheric observation equipment can't see anything through the darkness. And truly terrifying creatures are hiding in this darkness -the mesocyclones. Here's a rare shot of one such whirlwind over the Atkarsk Sea. This atmospheric phenomenon most often appears during the cold period of the year. They differ from the conventional tropical cyclones that our country experiences — they tend to be smaller—200-600 km. Also, mesocyclone has a short lifespan — less than a day, on average. Due to this, they can't always be found on synoptic maps, but they still need to be tracked, since anyone who gets in their way will be sorry.
"Look at this wind, it's knocking people down".
Hurricane winds and stormy seas can lead to ships icing over. Snow leads to a critical deterioration in visibility. The bad weather appears suddenly and quickly gains strength. There are several areas in the Russian Arctic where polar mesocyclones form, they are in the areas of Barents, Kara, and the East Siberian Sea. These are areas where fishing takes place and where there are plans to develop oil and gas production.
After dispelling the polar night darkness over the ocean with the help of illuminator satellites, it will be possible to detect mesocyclones with more accuracy, which means there'll be more time to warn both the people on land and at sea.