Tokyo - Fancy a meteor shower racing across the night sky to mark your birthday? One Japanese start-up is hoping to deliver shooting stars on demand and choreograph the cosmos.
And, say scientists, it's not just about painting huge pictures on the night-sky that would be visible to millions of people; artificial meteors could help us to understand a lot more about Earth's atmosphere.
Lena Okajima, who holds a doctorate in astronomy, says her company -- ALE -- is intending to launch a micro satellite that can eject shooting stars at exactly the right time and place to put on a celestial show.
"I'm thinking of streams of meteors that are rare in nature," Okajima told AFP in an interview.
"It is artificial but I want to make really beautiful ones that can impress viewers," she said.
In collaboration with scientists and engineers at Japanese universities, the ALE team is developing a satellite that will orbit the Earth and eject dozens of balls, a few centimetres (an inch) in diameter, at a time.
These balls -- whose chemical formula is a closely-guarded secret -- will race through the atmosphere at around 7-8 kilometres (up to five miles) a second, glowing brightly from the friction created by smashing into the air.
Although it sounds fast, that is considerably slower than naturally-occurring meteors -- chunks of material that either broke away from a planet or never managed to form one in the first place -- which can hurtle through the atmosphere at up to 80 kilometres a second.
Tinkering with the ingredients should mean that it is possible to change the colour of each bright streak, says Okajima, offering the possibility of a multi-coloured flotilla of shooting stars.
The stars are expected to shine for several seconds before they are completely burned up -- well before they fall low enough to pose any danger to anything on Earth.
"People may eventually become tired of seeing shooting stars if they come alone. But they could be coupled with events on the ground," Okajima said.
"Making the sky a screen is this project's biggest attraction as entertainment. It's a space display."
AFP
