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Comment by KnightOfWords | Hacker News Reader

Colour me moonglow sceptical blue. At an altitude of 500km these 'moons' would cross the sky in a few minutes. Geosynchronous orbit is about 35,000km, but at that distance any artificial satellite would need to be vast to cast any significant light. Regular satellites at that distance aren't naked-eye visible.

This report is, at best, seriously garbled.

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They can be visible its just relatively rare and only happens at certain times of the year depending on altitude when the solar panels line up. Flares like these are pretty much just a tiny accidental version of this already, something intentionally designed and controlled to produce them would in theory be pretty easy.

My main thought is how well will this deal with the thrust that large of a mirror will be producing. It will essentially be a solar sail. Maybe they plan to rotate it during the day to provide the thrust to put it back into position?

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/530024-geostationary-sate...

Interesting thanks, I didn't realise they ever got that bright. I've also captured geosynchronous satellites when imaging the Orion Nebula, they show up as parallel tracks.

There is a big difference between producing a visible flare and actually providing illumination at that distance, that would require a huge surface. My best guess is that the original press release was talking about a paper project rather than anything there are any real plans to do.

There a large difference is but those flares are all produced by relatively small surfaces that aren't designed to reflect significant amounts of light (quite the opposite in fact) and a purpose built device.

> This report is, at best, seriously garbled.

It's just run-of-the-mill journalism. Just write what it says in the press release, don't ask any questions.

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