WSJi take on the Leonid shower situation. Forgot that is was coming up so soon. As if we needed more fuel for the markets' fire, fire-sale. . .
August 28, 1998
Big Meteor Show Headed Our Way
Has Satellite Researchers Thrilled
By RAJU NARISETTI
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 81 days, the Earth will run into the worst meteor storm in 32 years. And for $50,000, Richard Worsfold will give you a blow-by-blow account.
Mr. Worsfold is leading a group of international researchers who will hunker down in the snake-infested outback of northern Australia and the chilly Gobi Desert in Mongolia during the early hours of Nov. 17.
Their mission: to monitor the Leonid meteoroid storm, the first space hurricane of the modern satellite era. While it poses no danger to people because the meteoroids will burn up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere, it poses some threat to the 500-odd satellites orbiting the planet.
Pricey Updates
Mr. Worsfold's dream: to line up as many commercial-satellite operators as possible to pay up to $50,000 each for 15-minute updates on a meteoroid infestation that will last six or seven days but will be most intense between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern time on the 17th.
Mr. Worsfold isn't alone. At least one other team is trying to raise money for a similar expedition, in which they want to fly around in two aircraft and collect three-dimensional storm data. Meanwhile, people are flocking to conferences about the storm, and Web sites have sprung up by the dozen, offering everything from predictions of widespread satellite damage to a countdown clock. Also available are tips for amateur meteor-watchers (From one site: "Lay outside in a reclining chair with your feet pointing towards the east.")
The recent movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" have given us some feel for a Texas-size asteroid hitting Earth. Less dramatic by far, Leonid still has created a stir, with researchers trying to convince satellite operators that they have something to fear from meteoroids traveling at more than 155,000 miles an hour.
"Nobody is certain what will happen," concedes Mr. Worsfold, who is project manager at CRESTech, a research outfit in Toronto financed by the Canadian government that is host to the meteoroid-watch project. "We just don't want to go broke finding out. If you want true data, $50,000 is a fair price."
Meteoroids aren't a new threat to satellites. Every year, the Earth's orbit brings it into the debris path of about 11 meteor streams orbiting the sun. This annual display (seen from Earth as red, green and blue streaks) tends to be benign, with about 10 to 15 meteoroids an hour spread over thousands of miles.
What's in store this November isn't your average storm. The Leonid is made up of debris from the Tempel-Tuttle comet. Earth will run into debris from this comet just nine months after it blew by the sun, creating a plume of sand and dust. Since the debris hasn't had time to disperse, Earth will encounter a 136,000-mile swath of it, most of it smaller than the diameter of human hair but traveling at three times the speed of the normal meteoroid.
Junk Storm
For satellites, that is like taking a stroll at night across an autobahn, with as many as 10,000 tiny pieces of junk whizzing by at more than 200 times the speed of sound. At that velocity, even a grain of sand crashing into a satellite could put a hole in it. And the impact could create an electric charge, potentially crippling to a satellite's electronics.
This year's storm isn't expected to be nearly as bad as one back in 1966, when some researchers tracked 100,000 or more meteoroids zipping by each hour. But there were only a few dozen satellites in orbit back then, mostly for weather forecasting and spying. Today's more numerous satellites are much more obviously important, handling everything from transmissions by pagers and wireless phones to TV signals and credit-card transactions.
The Leonid hullabaloo began in earnest in April, when Aerospace Corp., an El Segundo, Calif., company financed by defense dollars, co-hosted a gathering called the "Leonid Meteoroid Storm and Satellite Threat Conference." The event was a big hit -- by astronomy standards -- drawing about 200 participants from around the world, mostly satellite operators, but with a sprinkling of scientists, lawyers and insurance representatives, each paying $380 for two days of presentations on topics such as hypervelocity impact, shielding and avoidance and mitigation strategy.
Sandblasted, at Least
It was there that William Ailor, director of Aerospace Corp.'s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Study, warned that every single satellite will at least be "sandblasted" by Leonid. While it is unlikely that the storm will have a "major effect" on satellites, "it is possible that some satellites will be damaged," Mr. Ailor says.
His timing couldn't have been better. Just weeks later, PanAmSat Corp.'s Galaxy IV satellite failed because of a short circuit, knocking out pagers and radio and TV feeds across the U.S. While that event had nothing to do with meteoroids, it suggested what might happen if Mr. Ailor's assessment is accurate. By early June, Dr. Ailor was repeating himself, this time before the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics hearing on "Asteroids: Perils and Opportunities."
Still, the Leonid threat has been a tough sell. Since the 1958 advent of satellites, there has been only one documented instance of one being lost to a meteoroid hit. It happened in 1993, when the European Space Agency's Olympus was hit four times in two minutes by the Perseid meteoroid showers. Even then, the Olympus could have been saved but for an underprepared ground crew that wasted too much fuel in stabilizing the satellite, experts say.
Most satellite operators are accustomed to high failure rates; about four in every 100 launches fail to put a satellite in proper orbit. On top of that, many commercial "birds" are insured, especially against acts of God, which in most cases include meteoroid hits.
Normal Precautions
"When you tell them there is a one-in-100 chance of being damaged, they get very scared. When you say it is one in 1,000, they may not lose their lunch, but when it is one in 10,000, they say "to hell with it," " says David Lynch, an Aerospace astrophysicist who is on a competing team of Aerospace and NASA scientists still trying to raise Air Force money for two aircraft that would collect data during Leonid.
Most satellite operators plan to take normal precautions during Leonid, which typically include powering down unnecessary onboard electronics, avoiding special maneuvers and assembling what are known as Tiger Teams -- experienced veterans -- at ground-control centers to implement emergency maneuvers if a satellite is hit. NASA's Hubble Telescope will point its posterior toward the shower, protecting sensitive panels. Intelsat, a global satellite operator, is changing the angle of the solar arrays on many of its satellites to minimize any damage from the meteoroids.
"Reliability of spacecraft is a sacred thing around here," says Walter Braun, a senior vice president at GE American Communications Inc., a satellite-service provider owned by General Electric Co. "But there is wide divergence in opinions, and it is hard to know whose opinion to use."
Indeed. Estimates on the number of meteoroids per hour that Leonid will spew range from a stormy 10,000 to a relatively tame 200. Predictions are murkier as to how many satellites might be damaged. PanAmSat estimates the probability of an "adverse collision" with any of its 16 satellites at less than one-tenth of 1%. Over at GE Americom, Mr. Braun estimates that there is only a one in 100,000 chance that one of his 12 spacecraft will be hit.
"No offense, but it is all media hype," says Mr. Braun.
Storm Warning
But researchers say unpredictability is what makes Leonid so dangerous. "Comets are notoriously fickle, and they can do anything they want," says Edward Tagliaferri, head of ET Space Systems Corp., Camarillo, Calif., and a consultant on space-debris issues. "This comet could surprise us, and there is a possibility that the storm will be more severe than predicted."
That's where Mr. Worsfold gets into the picture. Using high-powered radar, as well as electro-optical video much like what CNN used at night during the Gulf War, CRESTech's field team plans to track the storm starting about two weeks before its Nov. 17 peak. (Based on the path of the meteoroids, Northern Australia and the Gobi Desert will offer the best vantage points.) The information will then be transmitted via the Internet to London and then to Ontario before going out to customers.
With a typical satellite costing $200 million or more, Mr. Worsfold says his data can be a relatively inexpensive early-warning system. But what of it? "If you are a sailor at sea and a storm is coming," says Stephen Stott of Intelsat, "it doesn't make much difference... . There's not much we can do."
For his part, Mr. Worsfold jokes that his selling job would be easier if a satellite or two were to get hit by meteoroids in the meantime. "That would be nice," he says. "But we don't want to put a curse on anybody."
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