The article begins with a recent announcement from Japanese company, ALE, detailing their plans to launch satellites by 2025 that will instigate an artificial meteor shower known as the ‘Sky Canvas’.
Understanding the Sky Canvas Project
ALE’s Sky Canvas project hopes to provide people across the globe with the opportunity to witness the world’s first live, man-made meteor shower. The company intends to use a pressure-driven system of gas tanks to propel pellets at a speed of 8 kilometers per second in order to create the artificial meteor shower.
Small satellites will be used to transport the metallic ‘shooting star’ particles to low-Earth orbit. Once the orbit stabilises, the particles will be released to travel part of the planet’s circumference before entering the atmosphere at an altitude ranging between 60 and 80 kilometers.
In addition to offering a mesmerising visual spectacle, ALE also aims to utilize the Sky Canvas project to gather atmospheric data in the mesosphere. This layer of the atmosphere, being too low to be observed by satellites and too high for weather balloons or aircraft, remains largely unexplored. A greater understanding of this atmospheric layer could contribute towards scientific knowledge surrounding climate change.
What Is a Natural Meteor Shower?
Natural meteor showers transpire when Earth passes through a debris stream left by a comet or asteroid. As Earth orbits around the Sun, it comes into contact with these debris streams containing miniscule rock and dust particles. On encountering the debris, the particles enter Earth’s atmosphere at incredibly high speeds, often around 40 kilometers per second.
The subsequent friction between the particles and the atmosphere engenders heat, causing the particles to vaporise and create the illuminated streaks commonly identified as meteors or shooting stars. Typically, the name of a specific meteor shower originates from the constellation where the meteors appear to radiate.
An example of this is the Perseid meteor shower which appears to originate from the constellation Perseus. On average, around 30 meteor showers that are visible from Earth occur annually, many of which have been consistently observed for hundreds of years.
This exciting new venture by ALE represents an innovative blend of science, technology and entertainment that promises to offer a unique and potentially enlightening experience for spectators worldwide.
