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Another Meteor Hits USENET Newsgroups
December 11th, 2009
If you missed out on last month’s Leonid meteor shower, don’t worry. Space and astronomy newsgroups report what very well may be the best meteor shower of the year will occur this coming Sunday and Monday.
Occurring in mid- December, the Geminid meteor shower is often the most reliable meteor shower of the year — you may see 30 to 60 meteors an hour. This year, newsgroups are reporting that the Geminid meteor shower’s peak is the night of December 13th and 14th of this year. According to NASA related newsgroups, the shower has intensified in recent years and researchers are curious if the trend will continue this year. There are many predictable meteor showers during the year, but most of them are not very spectacular, producing only a few more meteors than the background rate of five to 10 random meteors per hour.
As comets go around the sun, they also leave tiny grains of debris along their orbits. When the Earth crosses the orbit of a comet, it encounters this debris train, and we get a meteor shower. This year, the meteor shower appears during a new moon, so the sky should be dark and meteors should be easier to see.
The Geminids were quite weak when they were first identified in the late 19th century, but have intensified in those 150 years. In 2006, NASA astronomers observed at least five Geminid meteors crash into the moon. The shower derives its name from the fact that the meteors look like they are originating from the Gemini constellation.
Leonid Meteor Shower Top Space Newsgroups Chatter
November 16th, 2009
Stay up late and you might believe that Aliens are arriving in drones. However, read an astrology newsgroup and find out that the night sky will be lit up in the early hours of Tuesday morning hosting the Leonid meteor shower.
The annual event, named for the constellation Leo, is a light show of comet crumbs caught up in the Earth’s gravitational pull as the planet swings through the debris field.
Discovered in 1865, the Tempel-Tuttle comet orbits the sun every 33 years, and it’s around this time every year that the Earth passes through the cometary debris. Every year at this time it happens — with tons of ice and rock vaporizing in the earth’s protective atmosphere. The last time it came by was in 1998. In 1991, 2001 and 2002, the Earth passed through concentrated dust trails, which produced a meteor storm with thousands of meteors per hour. The number of meteors this year will be above average.
According to NASA and space related newsgroups, the best time to see the most activity will be between the hours of 3:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. EST. The shower should produce a “mild but pretty sprinkling” of meteors over North America (20 to 30 meteors per hour) followed by a more intense outburst over Asia, where observers may see 200 to 300 meteors per hour.
NASA Fulfills Promise Of Moon Punch
October 9th, 2009
The big news on newsgroups is that NASA deliberately aimed a rocket into the Moon to expand the search for water. NASA has said the rocket and satellite strike was a success, kicking up enough dust for scientists to determine whether or not there is water on the moon.
Nothing exploded, although two spacecraft — one about the size of a bus, the other a subcompact car — did crash on the surface of the moon. For background on the whys and wherefores, you can read more about moon exploration and the reasons for the LCROSS mission here and on some of the space and technology newsgroups.
Mission scientists said they did spy a thermal flash and spotted an approximately 20 meter sized created by the impact. They were most excited about a tiny bump in brightness seen by a mission spectrometer, which could signal the presence of water that some think exists as ice in the bottom of the target crater.
“We have the data we need to address the questions we set out to address”, said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission. At approximately 5.31pm IST on Friday, a rocket called LCROSS (for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), traveling at over twice the speed of a bullet, traversed the nearly 375,000 km from earth to Moon and slammed into the bottom of a lunar crater bathed in a permanent shadow.
The impact sequence was followed not only by telescopic eyes in space, such as LRO and the Hubble Space Telescope, but also by hundreds of telescopes, both professional and amateur, in North America, where the skies were mostly clear.
The one-two punch of crashing a booster rocket and its mother craft near the moon’s south pole didn’t kick up dramatic and visible plumes as hoped, but scientists reported that the mission had gathered enough data to tell whether the crater contains frozen water.
