this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
237 points (94.7% liked)

Not The Onion

12368 readers
383 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Some calculations:

In a 1000km orbit, you'll need a mirror about 9km across to appear 0.5° in diameter from the ground (the same size as the Sun), and therefore light up an area with the same illumination as the Sun.

Note that you can't make due with a smaller mirror focused to a tighter area, as the brightest thing the mirror can reflect is the Sun, and so it must appear at least as large as the Sun in the sky to illuminate any point on the ground by the same amount.

With the much dimmer goal of moonlight illumination levels, the mirror shrinks to 9km / sqrt(400,000) = 14.2m in diameter, which is actually rather reasonable. However it would only illuminate an area 0.5° wide from the mirror's point of view, or around 9km. And because the mirror is orbiting at 7.4km/s, you'd only get a second or two of illumination.

TLDR: Moonlight mirror 14m across, could light up a 9km diameter area for a little over a second.

Edit: In the case of a permanent mirror in geostationary orbit, a 500m mirror could provide moonlight illumination to an area around 300km in diameter.

[–] magiccupcake@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

While it would be cool for it to appear the size of the moon, it is not necessary with a shaped mirror.

You can keep the same size in a higher orbit, maybe even geosynchronous, then sync the rotation of the mirror to keep it pointing in the same spot on earth.

Granted a shaped mirror that size would be much harder to put into orbit than a flat mirror.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago

The 9km mirror I'm referencing is for a sunlight level of illumination; the moonlight mirror needs only be 14m in diameter (or 500m for geostationary orbit).