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Mirror, mirror in the sky
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Artist's depiction of the space mirror after deployment
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Russians will attempt
to banish night
with
artificial 'moon'
February 3, 1999
Web posted at: 4:55 p.m. EST (2155 GMT)
MOSCOW (CNN) -- The crew of the Russian Mir space station were preparing Wednesday for a dazzling experiment that could briefly turn night into day over some areas of the Earth, including the northwestern tip of the United States and Bonn, Germany.
The Znamya (Banner) experiment, which is scheduled to start at around 1 p.m. Moscow time (1000 GMT, 5 a.m. EST) Thursday, envisages unfolding a space mirror made of a membrane covered by a metal layer.
The mirror is supposed to work like an artificial moon, reflecting sunlight onto several regions in Russia and other former Soviet republics before reaching Germany and the Czech Republic, said Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin.
The circle of light, measuring 5 to 8 kilometers (three to five miles) across on the ground, will move during the following 24 hours at a speed of about 7 meters (yards) a second. According to the Russian ground control center, the light beam should sweep across the following areas, in consecutive order:
In tests lasting six minutes each, the device will light up the Earth with an intensity of between five and 10 times that of a full moon.
However, the officials said visibility would depend heavily on the weather and on how the cosmonauts managed to direct the mirror.
The cosmonauts will have to open the docking unit between the Mir and the Progress and install the folded mirror in it.
The Progress will then part from Mir, and at a distance of 400 meters the mirror is to automatically unfold. Padalka and Advedeyv will control the cargo spaceship from the Mir, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.
At the end of the experiment the mirror will be ejected into space and will burn down in the upper layers of the atmosphere, Itar-Tass said.
The sunbeam is expected to hit the German city Bonn and the Czech city Plzen between 8:45 and 8:47 p.m. Moscow time (between 1745 GMT and 1747 GMT).
The mirror's designers say it will serve as a prototype for much larger models that may be used to illuminate sun-starved northern cities. In the more distant future, such devices may act as "solar sails," using solar wind to help push spaceships through space.
The folded membrane is now attached to a Progress cargo ship docked to the station. At the start of the experiment, the crew will jettison the Progress, guide it to a position some 400 meters (1,312 feet) away from the station, and then send a signal to unfold the mirror.
Russia ran a similar experiment six years ago, but the crew then didn't try to maneuver the mirror and it was barely visible only to those who knew its position.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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