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Best Meteor Shower This Year
LittleRedStar writes "This Wednesday night and Thursday morning is the peak of the
Geminid meteor shower. This is the typically the best meteor show of the year with up to 100 meteors per hour. This year the moon is a nuisance, but with the peak predicted for early Thursday morning it is worth getting out and watching. Since the Perseid meteor shower was washed out from the moon and the Leonids were a bust, this should be the best for 2006."
OK but what if 3200 Phaethon occasionally has outbursts when it is closest to the sun. Doing that will blow a lot of rock off the surface and create meteor showers, it can also change the orbit.
Space probes try to perform trajectory changes when deep in a gravitational field because coupling with a large mass actually helps you get more velocity change from a given impulse.
Its not going to be fun for us of this object changes course one day and collides with the Earth.
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I'm not totally sure I would like a meteor shower. I mean, showers are supposed to cleanse, not kill.
What I do know is that, here in the UK, there will be no point in going out to have a look unless you want to get cold and wet- all you'll see is rain and more rain.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
We can all sit on blankets with our girlfriends and hold hands while we watch this.. oh wait..
in terms of intensity; I saw only 4 common very faint streaks in 20 minutes.
However, I also was treated to a rare one that looked like a piece of shrapnel from fireworks coming down. That made it all worthwhile, certainly taking into account the unusually pleasant viewing conditions for a November night.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Hmmmm. Middle of finals week. Is it really worth it? I'll do it, I might even stay up all night before that final anyway!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
If I watch I get blinded making me easy prey for a strange race of mobile plant creatures OR I might get disintegrated or zombified.
If I don't watch I have to be one of the last surviving humans to fight off those plant creatures OR zombies.
Decisions, Decisions...
I have the general feeling that your answer is correct but nonetheless confusing. I would explain it this way:
If you pass near a large object, you accelerate towards it. If it's gravity doesn't cause you to crash into it, at your nearest point you'll be going much faster and then you'll slow down. This is generally akin to putting your car in neutral and going down into a ravine and up the other side.
Look at that analogy from the side, and you can see that the angle you had pointing "down" is much different than the angle pointing "up" - in this process, without acceleration, we've turned a lot - with a substantial change in vector momentum but in the end no change in the amount of momentum. (If we're at the same height and didn't accelerate, we have the same amount of momentum, but in a different direction.)
Now, in our analogy the object is below us (earth) whereas in space we go AROUND it to make this happen - and there's a limited kind of curves the ravine will follow.
There are huge advantages to making adjustments to your course during this process, because these adjustments can help you make perfect use of the "slingshot" of the object - so a small amount of thrust may result in gaining the most perfect exit trajectory possible.
(The post that said impulse = net momentum change isn't wrong, except that we're talking about "impulse generated from the probe" and excluding "impulse generated by getting lower into the gravity well of something" (etc.))
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I knew that there was a meteor shower tonight as soon as I got up this morning, because it was cloudy and raining after several days of clear skies. Here in the DC area that's an infallible predictor of an astronomical event.
Remember:
If you live in the Northeast, just aim your telescope directly into the sun, the resulting blindness will be just as impressive as the shower thanks to the light polution on the eastern seaboard.
It's getting much worse too. I used to be able to see the Milky Way from about 15 miles out of NYC, now I have to drive at least 2 hours. (So, 30 miles at least, traffic sucks here too.)