OKAY, so it was not as impressive as itwas supposed to be. But now that theover-hyped Lenoid meteor shower is athing of the past, one group of people -the satellite owners - are breathingsighs of relief.
As far as meteor showers are concerned, astronomers still insist thatLenoids put on a reasonable display. Butthose who had predicted that Asianviewers will see a storm similar to thecelebrated event of 1996, when skiesabove North America were ablazewith thousands of shooting stars, are alllooking the other way now.
So are the doomsday prophets whosuggested that many satellites would berendered useless by the meteor storm.These orbiting multi-million dollarpieces of hardware appear to haveemerged out of the storm unscathed.Barren Beneski, a spokesperson forOrbital Sciences in Virginia, USA, says that the company's 30 communicationsand imaging satellites survived withouta detectable hit. "We see no degradationin performance," he says.
Irridium telecoms consortium,based in the US capital Washington,boasts of more than twice the numberof satellites as Orbital. They, too, areonly happy that all their satellitescame out of the storm without a scratch.Both the Hubble Space Telescope andRussia's ageing Mir space station - twoof the largest objects currently in orbit,experienced no problem..
The US National Aeronautics andSpace Administration (NASA) observations made from aircraft flying abovethe Japanese island of Okinawa duringthe predicted peak of the storm indicatethat the there were between 200 and300 meteors per hour - 20 times asmany as in a typical Lenoid shower, butstill fewer than expected.
However, predictions about thestorm's timing may have been incorrect.Reports from the UK-based IsaacNewton Telescope imply that there werebetween 1,000 and 2,000 meteor trailsan hour at 0500 Greenwich Mean Time(GMT) on November 17 - about 16hours before the predicted peak.