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(meteorobs) Re: NOT off-topic: Consortium Wishes to Light Up Night Sky!?
Hello Lew,
I do hope this is a "Canard", because otherwise..... Must not think of
the idea that such would be true during our November Sino-Dutch Leonid
Expedition to Qinghai!!!!!! "Braindead" is indeed the right word for such
crazy plans. They should lock-up such people...
-Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society
DMS-CAS Sino-Dutch Leonid Expedition 1998
Op Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Lew Gramer schreef:
>
> Forgive me if this wild scheme is already generally known,
> and far be it from me to be alarmist, BUT...
>
> The following excerpt is from the online pages of "New
> Scientist" magazine. Review their complete article at:
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/cgi-bin/pageserver.cgi?/ns/980620/nspacemirror.html
>
>
> "London, Brussels, Seattle and Kiev will be
> just some of the cities lit up from space in
> November if an ambitious Russian experiment
> goes to plan. A consortium of aerospace companies
> intends to launch a giant mirror that will reflect
> sunlight down to Earth, appearing up to **ten times
> as bright as the full Moon**. [!]
>
> "The experiment, called Znamya 275, is the
> brainchild of the Space Regatta Consortium
> (SRC). The companies involved, led by Energia of
> Korolev, near Moscow, hope that a successful test
> will drum up interest in their plan to use up to 200
> such reflectors to bring sunlight to the Arctic
> during the dark days of winter.
>
> "Astronomers are aghast. If the idea catches on,
> they say, it could spell the end of ground-based
> astronomy by dazzling their telescopes. "I cringe to
> think that we could lose the night sky because of
> all these companies with their brain-dead ideas,"
> says Daniel Green, an astronomer at the
> Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
> Cambridge, Massachusetts."
>
>
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