Leonid Meteor Shower adds to Space Debris Hazards

Meteor showers produce gorgeous light shows. But the space debris responsible for them – usually dust cast off from comets – can seriously damage spacecraft, since it travels at relative speeds of up to 260,000 kilometres per hour.

This year, the Leonid shower peaks on 17 November and could produce a spectacular 300 meteors per hour during its peak.

This image of the 1999 Leonid shower was taken from an aircraft.

(Image: NASA-ARC/Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano/ISAS)


Satellites are not totally defenceless, however. When especially intense meteor showers are expected, they can orient their solar panels edge-on to the stream of impactors to minimise the chance of damage.

That was not possible for the European Space Agency's Olympus 1 satellite during the 1993 Perseid shower. An earlier meteoroid impact had disabled the pointing system on one of its solar arrays, leaving it exposed to the meteors, according to NASA's Bill Cooke.

Unfortunately for Olympus 1, the shower was especially intense that year because the comet responsible for the shower, Swift-Tuttle, had passed by Earth just the year before, leaving a fresh trail of debris.

During the shower, a Perseid impact seems to have led Olympus 1 to spin out of control. Efforts to regain control used up most of the spacecraft's fuel, leaving just enough to send it into a "graveyard" orbit, where it would not hit other satellites.

(Image: ESA)