I heard that when international space station completed it could be seen by naked eye on the earth. Is this correct?
Asked by: Ustun
Answer
Yes, this is correct. Most artificial satellites in orbit
have highly reflective materials on their outside to prevent their
instruments from overheating due to excessive exposure to sunlight.
This reflected sunlight is easily seen from Earth at night. Typically, it
looks like a flashing star slowly moving across the sky. These are usually called flashing
satellites.
http://www.heavens-above.com has predictions of when you can see these satellites.
Answered by: David Lent, Computer Engineering Student, UIC, Chicago
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '