Move over AI, world is getting ready for 'artificial meteor shower'

All things artificial have been changing our lives for a long time now. The recent jolt came in the form of AI chatbots like ChatGPT which appear likely to soon fill up for humans with an urge to seem 'smarty pants'. Meteor showers appear set to join the artificial bandwagon soon. The Independent has reported that ALE, a Japanese company based in Tokyo. It is planning to create the artificial meteor showers with the help of satellites which are scheduled to lift-off 2025 onwards.

The whole hoopla about artificial meteor shower may sound like some smart dude's idea to satisfy the eccentricities of his rich counterpart. But the artificial meteor shower is going to serve a scientific purpose.

Mesosphere, a layer in the Earth's atmosphere, is said to be a tricky area to study. Mesosphere is too high above for weather balloons and too low for satellites.

The Project Canvas, as the Japanese company's project is called, is going to create the 'meteor shower' by using a pressure driven system of gas tanks, as reported by the BBC.

Naturally occurring meteor shower takes place when Earth moves through a patch of space debris caused by a comet or an asteroid. These particles, when they enter Earth's atmosphere under the gravitational pull, generate heat due to friction. And at this moment they are visible from the surface of the Earth as 'shooting stars'

In Project Canvas, the satellites will shoot tiny pellets in the Earth's atmosphere at the speed of 8 kilometres per second. It being hoped that studying the path and light emission of these pellets' passage through the Mesosphere will enable the scientists to gather more information about the layer of the atmosphere.

The result, for laypersons watching from the Earth's surface, will be an artificial meteor shower.