Reflect Orbital promises sunlight on demand. What exactly does that mean and how would it affect astronomy? Image via Marys_fotos/ Pixabay.
- Reflect Orbital is a startup company in the U.S. that wants to provide light for solar farms at night, among other uses.
- The company suggested putting 250,000 satellites into space covered with mirrors in order to achieve their night-lighting goals.
- Scientists said this plan could be dangerous for astronomers and others. Plus, it still would not adequately achieve the goals they are claiming.
By Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University and Matthew Kenworthy, Leiden University
What is Reflect Orbital?
A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by U.S. startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design.
The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset.
It plans to start with an 18-meter (60-foot) test satellite named Earendil-1, which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports.
So, how bad would the light pollution be? And perhaps more importantly, can Reflect Orbital’s satellites even work as advertised?
Bouncing sunlight
Sunlight can be bounced off a wristwatch to produce a spot of light. Image via M. Brown/ The Conversation.
In the same way you can bounce sunlight off a watch face to produce a spot of light, Reflect Orbital’s satellites would use mirrors to beam light onto a patch of Earth.
But the scale involved is vastly different. Reflect Orbital’s satellites would orbit about 625 km (388 miles) above the ground. And they would eventually have mirrors 54 meters (177 feet) across.
When you bounce light off your watch onto a nearby wall, the spot of light can be very bright. But if you bounce it onto a distant wall, the spot becomes larger … and dimmer.
This is because the sun is not a point of light, but spans half a degree in angle in the sky. This means that at large distances, a beam of sunlight reflected off a flat mirror spreads out with an angle of half a degree.
What does that mean in practice? Let’s take a satellite reflecting sunlight over a distance of roughly 800 km (500 miles). That’s because a 625-km-high (388-mile-high) satellite won’t always be directly overhead, but beaming the sunlight at an angle. The illuminated patch of ground would be at least 7 km (4.3 miles) across.
Even a curved mirror or a lens can’t focus the sunlight into a tighter spot due to the distance and the half-degree angle of the sun in the sky.
Would this reflected sunlight be bright or dim? Well, for a single 54-meter satellite, it will be 15,000 times fainter than the midday sun. But this is still far brighter than the full moon.
Mylar reflectors like these would unfold in orbit. Image via Josh Spradling/ The Planetary Society (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The balloon test
Last year, Reflect Orbital’s founder Ben Nowack posted a short video that summarized a test with the “last thing to build before moving into space.” It was a reflector carried on a hot air balloon.
In the test, a flat, square mirror roughly 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) across directs a beam of light down to solar panels and sensors. In one instance, the team measures 516 watts of light per square meter (11 sq ft) while the balloon is at a distance of 242 meters (794 feet).
For comparison, the midday sun produces roughly 1,000 watts per square meter. So 516 watts per square meter is about half of that, which is enough to be useful.
However, let’s scale the balloon test to space. As we noted earlier, if the satellites were 800 km (500 miles) from the area of interest, the reflector would need to be 6.5km by 6.5km, or 42 square kilometers (16 square miles). It’s not practical to build such a giant reflector, so the balloon test has some limitations.
So what is Reflect Orbital planning to do?
Reflect Orbital’s plan is “simple satellites in the right constellation shining on existing solar farms.” And their goal is only 200 watts per square meter, or 20% of the midday sun.
Can smaller satellites deliver? If a single 54-meter satellite is 15,000 times fainter than the midday sun, you would need 3,000 of them to achieve 20% of the midday sun. That’s a lot of satellites to illuminate one region.
Another issue: satellites at a 625-km (390 mile) altitude move at 7.5 kilometers per second (16,800 mph). So a satellite will be within 1,000 km (621 miles) of a given location for no more than 3.5 minutes.
This means 3,000 satellites would give you a few minutes of illumination. To provide even an hour, you’d need thousands more.
Reflect Orbital isn’t lacking ambition. In one interview, Nowack suggested 250,000 satellites in 600-km-high (370-mile-high) orbits. That’s more than all the currently cataloged satellites and large pieces of space junk put together.
And yet, that vast constellation would deliver only 20% of the midday sun to no more than 80 locations at once, based on our calculations above. In practice, even fewer locations would be illuminated due to cloudy weather.
Additionally, given their altitude, the satellites could only deliver illumination to most locations near dusk and dawn, when the mirrors in low Earth orbit would be bathed in sunlight. Aware of this, Reflect Orbital plan for their constellation to encircle Earth above the day-night line in sun-synchronous orbits to keep them continuously in sunlight.
Cheaper rockets have enabled the deployment of satellite constellations. Image via SpaceX/ Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Bright lights
So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely.
In the early evening it doesn’t take long to spot satellites and space junk … and they’re not deliberately designed to be bright. With Reflect Orbital’s plan, even if just the test satellite works as planned, it will sometimes appear far brighter than the full moon.
A constellation of such mirrors would be devastating to astronomy and dangerous to astronomers. To anyone looking through a telescope the surface of each mirror could be almost as bright as the surface of the sun, risking permanent eye damage.
The light pollution will hinder everyone’s ability to see the cosmos, and light pollution is known to impact the daily rhythms of animals as well.
Although Reflect Orbital aims to illuminate specific locations, the satellites’ beams would also sweep across Earth when moving from one location to the next. The night sky could be lit up with flashes of light brighter than the moon.
The company did not reply to The Conversation about these concerns within deadline. However, it told Bloomberg this week it plans to redirect sunlight in ways that are “brief, predictable and targeted,” avoiding observatories and sharing the locations of the satellites so scientists can plan their work.
The consequences would be dire
It remains to be seen whether Reflect Orbital’s project will get off the ground. The company may launch a test satellite, but it’s a long way from that to getting 250,000 enormous mirrors constantly circling Earth to keep some solar farms ticking over for a few extra hours a day.
Still, it’s a project to watch. The consequences of success for astronomers – and anyone else who likes the night sky dark – would be dire. 
The number of satellites visible in the evening has skyrocketed.
Michael J. I. Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University, and Matthew Kenworthy, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Leiden University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Bottom line: The startup company Reflect Orbital has proposed putting hundreds of thousands of satellites with mirrors in space to illuminate areas of Earth at night. But can it be done? And should it be done?
Read more: Light pollution is impacting astronomy around the globe