(7/23/98)
RUSSIAN scientists are planning to put what will appear to be a second moon, 10 times as bright as a full Moon, into the night sky above London and other cities in November as part of a scheme to end night-time.
The orbiting space mirror will pass across the night sky quickly, up to 16 times in 24 hours, but will last only one night - Nov 9 - before burning up in the atmosphere. The reflecting spacecraft, Znamya 2.5, is part of a Russian-led consortium's plan which bears some similarities to the plot of the Bond film Diamonds are Forever.
The Space Regatta Consortium, a group of companies led by Energia of Korolev, near Moscow, wants to launch a constellation of several hundred mirrors, each up to 100 times brighter than the full Moon, to cast sunlight from the far side of the globe into the darkest corners of Siberia during the Arctic winter and make city street lights obsolete.
But the proposal has alarmed environmentalists and astronomers. Daniel Green, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said: "I cringe to think that we could lose the night sky because of all these companies with brain-dead ideas."
David Thomas, of Bangor University, told BBC Wildlife that almost any ecosystem "would get completely screwed up" and that the permanent daylight could cause more Arctic ice to melt. He said plants and animals depended on darkness. He said: "Everything - sex, movement, feeding, my wife's period - is triggered by day length."
Provided that there is little cloud on the night, London, Brussels, Frankfurt, Kiev, Seattle and Quebec are among the cities that will be lit up by what will appear to be a disc between five and 10 times as bright as a full Moon. Some estimates say it could appear to be up to half the size of the Moon. The previous experiment with Znamya 1, a 60 ft wide space mirror, was hampered by cloud. At best, it was only half as bright as the Moon since the reflector did not form a full disc.
Thomas also noted that he was "really looking forward to" the eyewitness accounts from UFO-watchers around the globe.