快猫短视频

IT WAS less enjoyable than expected, and it climaxed too soon. But satellite
owners, at least, are thankful for last week鈥檚 disappointing showing by the
Leonid meteors.

As meteor showers go, the Leonids put on a reasonable display. But many
astronomers had predicted that skywatchers in Asia would see a storm similar to
the celebrated event of 1966, when the skies above North America were ablaze
with thousands of shooting stars
(鈥淭aken by storm鈥�, 快猫短视频, 14 November, p 42).

Doomsayers had suggested that many satellites would be disabled by the storm.
But orbiting hardware appears to have emerged unscathed. Barron Beneski, a
spokesman for Orbital Sciences in Dulles, Virginia, says that the company鈥檚 30
communications and imaging satellites survived without a detectable hit. 鈥淲e see
no degradation in performance,鈥� he says.

The Iridium telecoms consortium, based in Washington DC, which has more than
twice as many satellites as Orbital, similarly came through scot-free. And both
the Hubble Space Telescope and Russia鈥檚 Mir space station, two of the largest
objects currently in orbit, experienced no problems.

NASA observations made from aircraft flying above the Japanese island of
Okinawa during the predicted peak of the storm indicate that there were between
200 and 300 meteors per hour鈥�20 times as many as in a typical
Leonid shower, but fewer than expected.

However, predictions about the storm鈥檚 timing may have been wrong. Reports
from Britain鈥檚 Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands imply that there
were between 1000 and 2000 meteor trails an hour at 0500 GMT on 17
November鈥攁bout 16 hours before the predicted peak.