JAKARTA - Astronomers are developing various ways to reduce the impact of climate change, one of which is by attaching an umbrella to an asteroid.
Astronomers Istv totaling Szapudi, from the University of Hawaii'i Institute of Astronomy, United States (US), believe asteroids can be captured, park them in front of Earth and attach umbrellas there to block some of the sun's light.
Indeed, one of the simplest ways to reduce global temperatures is to protect the Earth from a small fraction of sunlight.
The idea, called the solar shield, has been previously proposed, but the weight needed to make shielding quite difficult, where astronomers must balance gravitational forces and prevent solar radiation pressure.
But the hurdles are that the solar shield requires enough mass as a weight to prevent it from being blown away by the solar wind, radiation pressure, gravitational stability and when making the lightest material can cost a lot of money, as well as expensive.
In Hawaii, many use umbrellas to block sunlight while walking during the day. I was thinking, can we do the same for Earth and thereby reduce the upcoming climate change disaster?" said Szapudi.
The study using this approach, according to Szapudi, could begin now by making pre-implemented designs to reduce climate change in decades.
To start with, Szapudi intends to reduce solar radiation by 1.7 percent, an estimate of the amount needed to prevent a devastating global temperature increase.
He calculated that placing a moored balancer towards the Sun would reduce the weight of the shield to about 3.5 million tonnes, about a hundred times lighter than previously estimated.
While that number still goes far beyond current launch capabilities, only 1 percent of the weight, about 35,000 tonnes will be the shield itself, and that's the only part that needs to be launched from Earth.
With newer and lighter materials, the protective mass can be reduced further. The remaining 99 percent of the total mass will become asteroids or lunar dust used as an equalizer.
Such a moored structure will be faster and cheaper to build and use than any other shield design. However, to lower the weight of the shield, with lighter materials like graphene, it will still be very difficult to achieve.
This is because the largest rocket today is only able to lift about 50 tons into low Earth orbit, so this solar radiation management approach will be more challenging. Szapudi's approach brings the idea one step closer to achieving, even with the latest technology.
"Depending on the development of parallel and interconnected orbital graphene, tether, and orbital technology, the moored shield may initially be faster and cheaper to realize than the heavier structure," explained Szapudi.
"However, the latter may ultimately function as a source of solar energy for Earth exploration or the Solar System," he added.
The research has been published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was quoted from the University of Hawaii'i's official website, Thursday, August 3.
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