The six ride-along satellites include ALE-1, which was built by the Tokyo-based company Astro Live Experiences. ALE-1 is 24 inches long by 24 inches wide by 31 inches tall (60 by 60 by 80 centimeters) and is packed with 0.4-inch-wide (1 cm) particles engineered to create a sky show when they come down through
Earth's atmosphere.
ALE-1 and a few follow-on craft will "investigate feasibility of man-made meteors and [their] marketability," as well as provide data about Earth's upper atmosphere, Astro Live Experiences representatives
wrote in a project description.
Those first artificial
meteors won't flare up for another year or so. ALE-1 will eventually deploy a drag-increasing "membrane," which will help lower the satellite's altitude by about 62 miles (100 km). Then, in the spring of 2020, it will deploy its first pellets — over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, if everything goes according to plan. The resulting meteors should be visible to more than 6 million people, across a region about 125 miles (200 km) wide, Astro Live Experiences representatives said.