INNOVATION
Creating Meteors for the Tokyo Olympics
Every Olympic host country tries to come up with unique, memorable displays for its iteration of the Games
26 July, 2016
With the Tokyo Olympics planned for 2020, a Japanese startup working to create an artificial meteor shower is hoping to deliver the goods in time for the opening ceremonies.
Media outlets have called it a manmade meteor shower, but the truth is that similar artificial meteors have been tested – for completely different reasons – for decades. They're just not as pretty or as potentially problematic, depending on who you ask about awe-inspiring artificial meteor showers and the implications on Earth.
In essence, the Sky Canvas project recreates what happens when a naturally occurring meteor enters the earth's atmosphere. Shooting stars appear when a space rock burns up through a process called plasma emission. Japanese company ALE Ltd. aims to offer the world's first entertainment show in space by launching a satellite, and sending clusters of 500-1000 particles each down to Earth. The ALE scientists expect that, with a meteor usually burning across the sky at an altitude of 60 to 80 km, the artificial show will be similar in the wide area of its visibility – in Tokyo, that includes 30 million people.
In essence, the Sky Canvas project recreates what happens when a naturally occurring meteor enters the earth's atmosphere. Shooting stars appear when a space rock burns up through a process called plasma emission. Japanese company ALE Ltd. aims to offer the world's first entertainment show in space by launching a satellite, and sending clusters of 500-1000 particles each down to Earth. The ALE scientists expect that, with a meteor usually burning across the sky at an altitude of 60 to 80 km, the artificial show will be similar in the wide area of its visibility – in Tokyo, that includes 30 million people.
Meteor colors can be changed by the composition of the particles launched from the satellite. In the "pellet palette" created by National Geographic magazine, an entire rainbow of colors is possible. If copper pellets burn through the atmosphere, the artificial meteor turns green. If strontium particles are used, millions of people will see red when they turn their eyes toward the sky. In between those ends of the spectrum are a pink created with lithium, a blue created by cesium, and colors from other elements. ALE explains that this flame reaction is the same one learned in high-school chemistry labs, writ large.
While ALE touts its potential as the "Future of Entertainment in Space," the startup defends its science and the company's contributions to understanding space. Working with other international agencies, the company hopes to collect key data, advance the grasp of physics, and deepen an understanding of how naturally occurring meteors work, since artificial ones have known velocities, angles and chemical compositions to serve as experimental controls. In that last objective, though, ALE isn't the first to try.
Image: Centives
Experiments based on the creation of artificial meteors have occurred for decades, dating back to the 1940s. At the dawn of the space era, aluminium pellets were used to create artificial meteors in order to better understand the physics of space and build the ships that would one day launch into it. An October 1957 launch that sent aluminium "meteors" into space at estimated speeds of 40,000 mph (64,374 km/h) grabbed the headlines in newspapers across the United States. Dr. John Rinehart, a space pioneer at the Smithsonian laboratory in Massachusetts at the time, told reporters the fairly easy experiment "will help pave the way for a flight to the moon 'and beyond.'" Sixty years later, we know it did. Today, the science continues.
On Earth, aluminium pellets have been used to study how craters may have been formed and the physics of other impacts. So ALE's commitment to the science is likely to advance an understanding of how meteors work, and that's a passion for the well-qualified scientists working on the project. If Sky Canvas ultimately works – in time for the 2020 Olympics or not – it's likely to create some passion in ordinary citizens impressed by a new type of pyrotechnics in space and amazed at both the beauty and the science of artificial meteors.
On Earth, aluminium pellets have been used to study how craters may have been formed and the physics of other impacts. So ALE's commitment to the science is likely to advance an understanding of how meteors work, and that's a passion for the well-qualified scientists working on the project. If Sky Canvas ultimately works – in time for the 2020 Olympics or not – it's likely to create some passion in ordinary citizens impressed by a new type of pyrotechnics in space and amazed at both the beauty and the science of artificial meteors.
Banner image: e-flux