Tokyo based start-up Star-ALE is is designing a man-made meteor shower over the Japanese capital city , which will serve as the highlight of the 2020 Olympics opening ceremony. The meteor shower is expected to have an audience of 30,000,000 people and would be viewable from the ground in an area 120 miles across.
As a first step of the project named “Sky Canvas,” the company would launch a micro-satellite into space (the first is scheduled for the year 2017 ) that’s loaded up with 500 to 1,000 proprietary pellets containing various elements. The combustible pellets are made from various metals and elements so that they burn with different colors when ignited at an altitude of between 35 to 50 miles above Earth.
Lena Okajima, CEO and founder of ALE says:
I’m thinking of streams of meteors that are rare in nature, It is artificial but I want to make really beautiful ones that can impress viewers.Tinkering with the ingredients should mean that it is possible to change the color of each bright streak, offering the possibility of a multi-colored flotilla of shooting stars. Making the sky a screen is this project’s biggest attraction as entertainment.
According to the the company, these artificial shooting stars have an apparent magnitude of -1, much brighter than Sirius, the brightest star that can be observed in the night sky which has an apparent magnitude of -1.5.
Tokyo, which hosted the Olympic Games last in 1964 plans to make the 2020 Olympics, the most high-tech one to date. Its plans include a robotic games village. real-time translator apps, high-speed 5G wireless connections, hydrogen-powered autonomous taxis, super-speed mag-lev trains and algae-fueled air crafts.
