Meteor monitoring

With a simple video camera you can help study the origins of meteor showers.

by Diana Hannikainen

Everybody enjoys a good meteor shower. But did you know that something as tiny as a meteoroid can cause fatal damage if it slams into a spacecraft? That might be what happened to the satellite Olympus-1 in 1993 during the Perseid meteor shower, when it spun out of control. Engineers managed to stabilise the craft, but the operation consumed so much propellant that they ultimately had to shepherd the satellite into the ‘graveyard orbit’. Imagine if that happened to a spacewalking astronaut. A millimetresize meteoroid travelling at, say, the speed of a Perseid (around 60 km/s) would puncture a hole in our the spacefarer's suit, too small to find before all the oxygen leaked out. Inevitably, the poor astronaut would suffocate. It hasn't happened. Yet. Statistics show there's a 1 in 5,000 chance…

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Australian Sky & Telescope (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2023

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