Perseid meteor shower: Double your pleasure for one hour

William Atkins
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 18:00

Science - Space

NASA also has more information on the Perseids at “The Perseids Are Coming.”

The article states in part, “For sky watchers in North America, the watch begins after nightfall on August 11th and continues until sunrise on the 12th. Veteran observers suggest the following strategy: Unfold a blanket on a flat patch of ground. (Note: The middle of your street is not a good choice.) Lie down and look up."

"Perseids can appear in any part of the sky, their tails all pointing back to the shower's radiant in the constellation Perseus. Get away from city lights if you can.”

In addition, the European Space Agency (ESO) has an association with the Perseid meteor shower. One of its satellites was reported to have been impacted by a Perseids object in 1993.

It says on the MEO website, “The objective of the MEO is to understand the flux and the associated risk of meteoroids impacting spacecraft traveling in and beyond Earth’s orbit. Meteoroids impacting spacecraft are a quantifiable risk as they can puncture pressurized volumes (i.e. space station modules, propellant tanks) or destroy components (i.e. engines, electronics)."

"While meteoroids have never been definitively proven to have destroyed a spacecraft, there have been several in-flight anomalies attributed to meteoroid impacts including loss of the Olympus satellite to control system failure induced by a Perseid shower meteor impact."

Olympus-1 was a satellite launched by the ESA on July 12, 1989, from Kourou, French Guiana, on an Ariane rocket. It began to lose its ability to communicate with Earth at 23:32 UT on August 11, 1993, at the height of that year’s Perseid meteor shower.

According to the paper “Olympus end of life anomaly--a perseid meteoroid impact event?” by R. Douglas Caswell and Andrew Taylor (Olympus spacecraft managers at ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands), and Neil McBride (Space Sciences Institute, University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K.), “While an impact by a meteoroid could not be proven, it is a possible scenario.”

The satellite was taken out of service just after its supposed collision with the Perseid object.

Additional information on the Perseids impact with Olympus-1 is found at the July 29, 2005 Astronomy magazine article “Deep Perseid Impact” by Bill Cooke.