Artificial Meteor Showers - UPSC Current Affairs

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Context

Tokyo-based company plans to launch small satellites that can produce artificial meteor showers.

Details

The company is set to launch the satellite in 2025 and it hopes to give people all over the world “the opportunity to view the world’s first live human-made meteor shower.
The project is called Sky Canvas and it is designed to collect atmospheric data in the mesosphere, which is the third layer of the atmosphere. The Mesosphere is too low to be observed by satellites and too high for weather balloons or aircraft.
ALE plans to do this by using a pressure-driven system of gas tanks that will shoot pellets at a speed of 8 kilometres per second.
ALE hopes to reproduce the effect of natural meteor showers by using metal “shooting star” particles that are around 1 centimetre in size.
These grains will be taken to a low-Earth orbit about 400 kilometres above the planet by small satellites.
Once the satellites’ orbit stabilises, they will release the particles.
The particles will then travel around part of the planet before entering the atmosphere at an altitude of 60 to 80 kilometres.

Natural Meteor Shower

A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate, or originate, from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories.
Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth's surface. Very intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which produce at least 1,000 meteors an hour, most notably from the Leonids.

PRACTICE QUESTION (BASIC)

Q. Which of the following statements are correct?

a)A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing.

b)A Meteorite is a relatively small chunk of rocky minerals that orbits the Sun, often described as a minor planet.

1) Only a

2) Only b

3) Both a and b

4) Neither a nor b

Answer: 1