Word: tempel
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There ought to be plenty of fireworks this Fourth of July. But the best pyrotechnics show is likely to take place 268 million miles away, when a probe fired from the Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to collide with Comet Tempel 1, a nine-mile-long rock roaring through space at 66,880 m.p.h. The planned cosmic crack-up will gouge out a football-field-size crater and may be visible from the U.S. Pacific Coast and points west. It may also reveal a lot about the chemistry of comets, fossils of the early solar system...
...Leonid shower occurs each November when the Earth’s orbit passes through the trail of dust left by comet Tempel-Tuttle, which swings around the sun once every 33 years. The dust grains, traveling at 158,000 miles per hour, glow and vaporize as friction heats them up in the upper atmosphere and produces streaks of light...
Stargazers are celebrating and satellites are battening the hatches as the earth makes its annual passage Wednesday and Thursday through the trail of the Tempel-Tuttle comet. Each year on or around November 18, different parts of the world are treated to the Leonids - a show of "shooting stars" (actually meteoroids from the comet's tail). Normally 10 to 20 light up the night sky each hour, but this year the show should be considerably better. Astronomical records dating to the beginning of the millennium show that every 33 years or so the Leonids spike a little as the comet...
...Leonid meteor storm -- and while stargazers across the globe settle down for a romantic cascade of shooting stars, scientists and corporations scramble to save their satellites from the biggest Earth-bound bombardment the space age has ever seen. As you read this, tiny fragments from the Comet Tempel-Tuttle's tail are whizzing toward our unsuspecting planet at a dizzying 155,000 mph. You, of course, are protected by many miles of flammable, oxygen-rich atmosphere. The satellite your pager uses -- not to mention your phone company, your cable company and your government -- isn't so lucky. Our entire orbital...
Indeed, that is the situation this month. Tempel-Tuttle recently swept past Earth, swinging around the sun in February, and headed back toward the outer solar system. As a result, Earth will come within 700,000 miles of the center of the stream--a close shave by astronomical standards. And because Tempel-Tuttle orbits the sun in the opposite direction of Earth, the meteoroids will hurtle in at a closing speed of some 160,000 m.p.h...