China wants to replace lampposts with artificial moons

Remember to walk the streets on a full moon night. Well, everything is romantic, poetic, dreamy and all that, but did this thought to you that it also eliminated the need for street lighting in many places?

Yes, many places do not even need these street lights. moonlight, when our one and only natural satellite shines brightly without the clouds covering it. What if we had several bright moons above our heads at night? Will it be enough to reduce the electricity costs of streetlights? Well, that's the idea that China is thinking about now, although Russia has been trying moon mirrors in space in the mid-1990s as part of a project called "Banner".

China is now planning to launch artificial moons to the sky by 2020. The goal is to replace all streetlights to reduce the cost of electricity in urban areas. Chengdu, a city in southwest China's Sichuan Province, is working on the development of "artificial lighting satellites", which are going up and shining eight times stronger than the moon, the China Daily.

The first artificial moon is scheduled to be launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan and if all goes as planned, three more such satellites will be launched in 2022, informed the President of the Society of science of the new Tian Fu region, Wu Chunfeng. The organization oversees the artificial moon project. The first launch will be experimental and will determine whether or not the plan needs to be revised. However, once that is done, the next three satellites "will be the real deal with great civic and commercial potential," said Chunfeng.

Satellites will reflect sunlight and if they succeed, they could replace streetlights. in urban areas, which would save about 1.2 billion yuan, in electricity costs per year, for Chengdu. It will also be useful in disaster areas during power outages, Chunfeng added.

The launch of artificial moons is not the ambitious space project in China on which is currently working. The country also wants to place the Chang-e-4 lunar probe on the surface of the moon and the probe should be launched by the end of the year. If this mission succeeds, China will be the first country to explore the "dark side" of the moon.