By
Prarthana Mitra. As the cost of urban electrification reaches
unsustainable limits, advanced economies all over the world are coming
up with the most ...
Jan 12, 1993 - But Russian theorists have eagerly proposed solar reflector systems ... After Soviet scientists first proposed launching a demonstration reflector satellite in 1984, the Soviet Academy of ... Please try again later. ... The mirror will orbit at an altitude of about 225 miles, and from Earth will look like a bright star .
Jan 21, 2016 - In 1993, the 65-foot-diameter satellite, called Znamya, briefly lit the Earth like a giant orbiting night light. ... How a Russian Space Mirror Briefly Lit Up the Night ... When the Znamya satellite was deployed the night of February 4, 1993, ... Syromyatnikov spent years trying to replicate Znamya's success, but to ...
It may sound like a plan only a supervillain could imagine, but
during the 1990s, a group of Russian scientists and engineers devised a
gadget that redirected sunlight lost to space back to Earth. Acting like
a giant mirror, the device was intended to lengthen daylight hours,
provide solar energy for power, and possibly one day power spaceships.
And believe it or not, for a brief moment it actually worked, reports Brian Merchant for Motherboard. The project to build Znamya or “Banner,” as
it was called, began in the late 1980s to test technology that would
increase the length of a day with the goal of boosting productivity in
farms and cities in the then Soviet Union. Though this may sound like a nightmarish dystopian fantasy,
Znamya’s lead engineer, Vladimir Syromyatnikov, knew his stuff, Merchant
writes. Syromyatnikov had a reputation for brilliant engineering when
it came to space. He previously worked on the Vostok, the spacecraft
that propelled Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961. Many of his designs for
spacecraft docking mechanisms are still used in the shuttles that fly to
the International Space Station. “He was always thinking. If there was a problem, he always had a
sketch pad,” engineer Bruce Bandt, who worked with Syromyatnikov on the
Soyuz-Apollo program told Patricia Sullivan for the Washington Post
in 2006. “We had our shares of failures and problems in the test
[phase]... but it wouldn’t be long, sometimes overnight, before there
would be solutions.” Syromyatnikov
might have made his name with docking mechanisms, but in the late 1980s
his passion project was developing solar sails that could propel
spacecrafts through the stars by riding the stars’ radiation pressure
like ship sails in the wind. But Soviet leaders at the time were
obsessed with extending the work day to maximize productivity, so
Syromyatnikov pitched these solar sails as a means to redirect sunlight
back towards the Earth, Merchant writes. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Syromyatnikov continued to
work on the project, and in 1993 he got his chance to put Znamya to the
test. Funded by a collection of Russian state-owned corporations,
Syromyatnikov constructed a 65-foot-wide sheet of mylar that could be
unfurled from a central mechanism and launched from the Mir space
station, Warren E. Leary wrote for the New York Times at the time. “During the tests, Russian engineers say the small reflector should
cast light equivalent to three to five full moons over an area of Earth
measuring about three miles in diameter,” Leary wrote. As odd as the idea may seem, the test was successful. When the Znamya satellite was deployed the night of February 4,
1993, it directed a beam of light about two or three times as bright as
the moon and two-and-a-half miles wide down to Earth’s night sky,
passing across the Atlantic ocean, over Europe, and into Russia, Leary reported at
the time. While observers on the ground only reported seeing a bright
pulse as if from a star, astronauts in orbit said they could see and
follow a faint light across the sky below. A few days later, the mirror
burned up as it reentered the atmosphere. Syromyatnikov
spent years trying to replicate Znamya’s success, but to no avail. The
project cost too much money, and a follow-up satellite got caught on one
of Mir’s antennae, which ripped the delicate sail and the mission was
scrapped. When Syromyatnikov failed to drum up more investors for the
project, he went back to working on docking mechanisms until his death
in 2006, Merchant writes.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-russian-space-mirror-briefly-lit-night-180957894/#1eTMF5f9l8Lm7TIU.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Apr 27, 2010 - A long lost light reflector that was left on the surface of the moon by the Soviet Union has been found by a team of physicists, after scientists ...
In
an effort to illuminate the streets after dark, the Chinese scientists
are planning to place an artificial moon in orbit by 2020. According to a
report in China Daily, ...
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/0e/cc/0ecc1771-0dd9-4ca1-af2f-3cb9edaf1450/isslight.jpg)
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