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Moonlight may be romantic, but it's really not helpful. At only 1,400,000 times the brightness of the sun, the moon is usually not enough to light the night. Chinese scientists and engineers, however, do not want Chengdu residents to be content with the faint glow of Earth's natural satellite. As they announced recently, they can boost wattage with an artificial moon projected into space.
Last week, Wu Chunfeng, chairman of the Chengdu Research Institute for Microelectronic Systems for Aerospace Science and Technology, announced his intention to launch an "artificial moon" in 2020. He expressed at a national event on innovation and mass entrepreneurship held in Chengdu, China. Chunfeng said that the false-moon point, technically a lighting satellite, was to replace the Chengdu street lights.
According to Chunfeng, the lighting satellite will be eight times brighter like the real moon. But he also insisted that it was designed to "complete the moon at night". On Earth, its presence will appear as a "twilight-like glow" that can illuminate an area of about 50 miles in diameter.
The main engine of this project seems to be money. According to Chinese media, Chungfeng announced that the second moon would replace traditional energy sources, resulting in a reduction in energy consumption and contributing to a production value of 20 billion yuan five years after its launch .
In response to reporters' concerns that artificial light would disrupt astronomical observations, Kang Weimin, Ph.D., director of the Harbin Institute of Technology's Optics Institute, said that the artificial moonlight was the equivalent of a sunny evening. not enough to harm biological systems.
It is not clear whether the project is paid for or not by the city or the Chinese government, The Guardian reports, but the Research Institute of Microelectronic Systems of Science and Technology Aerospace Chengdu is the main contractor of the Chinese space program. China's space program has been evolving rapidly since 2015 and the country plans to double the number of launches in 2017 in the coming years.
Although this artificial moon project looks like science fiction, something similar has already been tried. In 1993, Russia launched its own lighting mechanism, called a space mirror, with the aim of increasing the duration of the day. He used a large sheet of plastic attached to a spacecraft to reflect sunlight on the Earth. For a moment, the camera directed a beam of light towards Russia, but for the inhabitants of the Earth, it only looked like the bright pulse of a star.
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