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Japanese Startup Wants To Rain Down Man-Made Meteor For Tokyo Olympics (sciencealert.com)
A startup called Star-ALE wants to create a man-made meteor shower over the city of Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics opening ceremonies. The pyrotechnics show, Star-ALE says, will be visible from an area 200km across Japan, and the pyrotechnics will actually shower from space. Starting next year, Star-ALE will begin sending a fleet of microsatellites carrying 500 to 1000 specially-developed pellets that ignite and intensely glow as they re-enter the earth's atmosphere. ScienceAlert reports: But wonderment comes at a cost, and in this case, that cost isn't cheap. Each combustible pellet comes in at about $8,100 to produce, and that's not including the costs involved in actually launching the Sky Canvas satellite. The company has tested its source particles in the lab, using a vacuum chamber and hot gases to simulate the conditions the pellets would encounter upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere. In its testing, the particles burn with an apparent magnitude of -1, which should ensure they're clearly visible in the night sky, even in the polluted skyline of a metropolis like Tokyo.
I really enjoy the sports at the Olympics, but I don't care for the excess. A big part of Greece's financial issues go back to the tremendous amount of public debt from hosting the Olympics in 2004. Priority should be given to cities that already have much of the required infrastructure instead of building it. There also needs to be a plan for how any new venues will be used in the future. In addition to being more financially responsible, it would be more environmentally friendly and produce less waste.