NEW DELHI (PTI): A meteor storm, returning after a 28year gap, will envelop earth’s orbit between 19972000 and threaten manmade satellites orbiting the Planet, astronomers have warned.
The Leonid meteor storm associated with the comet “P temple Tuttle” during its closest approach to the sun in 1998 could give rise to a cloud of meteoroids, the largest of them barely 8cm across but still threat to satellites.
The density of meteoroids in a storm could rise anywhere between. 300 to 10,000 times the normal density of meteoroids in a meteoroid ‘stream trailing al comet according to Canadian astronomers M Beech and P Brown.
During the storm the near earth flux of meteoroids will be high and the risk of their hitting satellites dramatically increased, the scientists from the University of Western Ontario said in a research publication.
“The high meteoroid flux and the rise in the space platform meteoroid impact probability from a leonid storm poses a tangible threat they said in the Agency (ESA) journal,”
However, even the largest of the storm meteoroids, barely 8cm across, should pose no threat to the earth itself; such small space rocks almost always bum themselves out in the earth’s atmosphere during entry.”
‘The earth last witnessed a meteor storm in 1966, a burst of meteoroid activity which was also due to the Leonid storm. Since then thousands of pieces of space age debris orbiting earth also pose a threat to future satellite operations.
According to astronomical records, the Leonid stream has led to at I cast 11 storms during the past 100 years.
While this accumulation of space debris makes satellite operations in earth orbit a risky operation, the ‘greatest long term threat to manmade space platforms” come from such meteor storms, the researchers said. Storm meteoroids have much higher collisional velocities than either space debris or sporadic meteoroids making them all the more dangerous in the event of a Collision with satellites they said.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 11, 1994
