Leonid Storm to Light Up the Night Sky, Nov. 18

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (11/7/02) -- The Leonid meteor storm is expected to light up the skies during two peaks on the evening of Nov. 18 and the early morning hours of Nov. 19.

The first peak will occur on Nov. 18 at about 11 p.m. EST and could peak at up to several thousand meteors per hour. The best viewing for this event will be in Europe and North Africa and over the Atlantic Ocean. The second similar peak will take place 6 to 7 hours later at around 5:30 a.m. EST, Nov. 19, and will be visible for all of North America.

A near full moon will make it harder to see the faint meteors, but the meteor flux is predicted to be high enough that it should be an impressive show nonetheless. The Leonid storm appears about every 33 years and is associated with the perihelion passage of "parent" comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

There won't be another Leonid storm even close to this magnitude until 2099, according to state-of-the-art models reported by Ray Russell, a senior scientist in The Aerospace Corporation's Remote Sensing Department. "This is probably the last opportunity to see a Leonid storm in our lifetimes," he said.

Russell and other Aerospace scientists and researchers study meteor dust particles and their properties using a spectrograph or spectrometer to collect spectral data and determine the particles' composition and, hopefully, the material's temperature and the temperature of the atmosphere along the meteor's path.

The Leonids comprise particles that can pose threats to orbiting spacecraft. The multitude of particles, while mostly microscopic in size, travel as fast as 42 miles per second.

"Something travelling that fast can puncture a circuit card or the solar panels on a spacecraft, or generate a conducting plasma near critical spacecraft electronics," Russell pointed out. "This plasma can short out the electronics onboard the spacecraft, although this is a relatively rare event even during a Leonid storm because of the huge volume of space over which the dust particles travel and the very small mass (micrograms or less) of most of the particles."