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Scientists Fly to 2008's Most Dazzling Meteor Shower
coondoggie writes "On Thursday, SETI Institute and NASA scientists will take their research instruments and their coffee for a 10 hour continuous flight to map what they say will be the earth's most brilliant meteor shower of 2008. Scientists believe the Quadrantid meteor shower could flash over 100 visible meteors per hour at its peak, depending on location. A Gulfstream V aircraft will take off from San Jose, Calif., and fly 14 scientists and their instruments for 10 continuous hours at 47,000ft., over the Arctic and back to San Jose. The primary goal of the lengthy airborne mission is to observe the Quadrantid meteor shower in ideal and virtually unchanging conditions far above light pollution and clouds to determine when the meteor shower peaks and how the flow of meteors are dispersed."
What can you learn about a meteor shower from 47,000ft that you can't learn from the ground? What can you learn from the dispersion in the first place?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
What are they doing, exactly? Seeing if the rocks are intelligent? Making sure the planet isn't being seeded by aliens?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This may be a silly question, but how to they know when there's going to be a meteor shower? Is there some sort of radar? Or do the meteors run predictable laps around the solar system?
Meteors watch you!
Seriously, though, what's wrong with watching from an area on the ground that has low Light Pollution? Does it not cost enough?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Well, at least those astronomers will get to experience one type of shower up close in their lives.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
SETI Institute and NASA scientists will ... map what they say will be the earth's most brilliant meteor shower of 2008.
At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I have been outside of my "little suburban island" and it looked glorious, so I can understand why they wouldn't want to watch a meteor shower from the middle of a metropolis. I thought their observatories were already built far away from cities? If they already have high powered telescopes in areas with low light pollution, what EXTRA benefit will an costly 10 flight give them?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
1. you learn you need to duck sooner than everyone else. 2. you learn what good landing strips are left after it has passed. are these scientists purchasing carbon credits or are they the other type? Sometimes i can't tell.
So they really can fly after all. Damn, should have been a scientist.
EOF
I Warned You!
Coffee? Lengthy?
A 10 hour shift is lengthy and requires lots of coffee?
I want that job. The blurb author must work 3 hours a day.
Seriously, though, what's wrong with watching from an area on the ground that has low Light Pollution? Does it not cost enough?
Weather probably has a lot to do with it. Getting good weather in January is tricky. If its not cloudy, its probably hazy from the cold temperatures. Also, the shower is best seen in very northern latitudes, where the chances of good weather are even slimmer. Flying above the weather gives you a much better view. And science likes a consistent view. You want to know that a spot where no meteors were seen is because there really weren't meteors there instead of hidden clouds blocking them. Otherwise, your frequency stats are skewed.
Table-ized A.I.
Flying a plane into a meteor shower just seemed like a scientifically brilliant thing to do. Haven't these guys seen a Hollywood movie ever? The rocks will smash the plane into bits!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Google CEO has some private jets, and wanted to land on the airstrip next to the Googleples. Unfortunately, Moffet field is a military airfield operated by NASA. NASA and Google however agreed to scratch each others backs: Googles private jets will be part of NASA's scientific research program, and the can land the jets right next to the Googleplex.
I'm guessing giving the NASA guys a few rides in a private jet, and serving a few bottles of champagne is a small price to pay to be able to park your fleet of jets outside you office, and at the same time avoid all normal hassles.
I hope the pictures of the meteores turn out well.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
NASA mourns the death of 14 scientists killed after their aircraft sustained
fatal damage while observing what was expected to be the most brilliant
meteor shower of 2008. It appears a fist sized meteor punched a hole through
the wing, igniting fuel within which subsequently weakened the wing structure
sufficiently to cause it to disintegrate.
Sounds like a sightseeing tour, followed by an airborne party, I'm sure.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yeah, all those astronomer types like to studdy.... watching stars and orbs all day....
In Seattle you can learn that the meteor shower is happening. In the Northwest getting above the clouds is almost your only hope of seeing such a thing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I can see that there are very few of us who think this is a accident waiting to happen.... why is that?
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
I snapped this image http://groups.imeem.com/iQrVatKB/photo/fIua32Y9X8/ with my Nikon D50 during the Aurigid shower last year and the data from this and other images was useful to Peter and his collaborators. So, take some time to snap some pictures if you're up for it, you never know it might be useful.
An airplane is found with meteorite holes in the Arctic Circle. No signs of survivors, but a strange blob was found attached to the aircraft.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Also, the in-flight movie will be Armageddon. Headphone rental is five dollars.
prepare for Fantastic Fourteen!
Hope that there will be lot of JA like chicks between them. i cannot really care for some 60yo invisible.
Is this to find an unknown native object by its collision trail?
I used to love meteor showers... now I stay behind the hill but remember tritium from downed satellites/star wars is water soluable... might wanna take a bath.
Observers on the ground found the meteors consisted of turbines, laptop computers and bits of 'alien lifeforms' which had clearly came from some environment resembling 'mother's basement'
Can someone help me with these two applets? They make no sense to me.
.
There's two little Java web applets called FLUXTIMATOR that allow you to put in your location and it will show you the expected number of shooting stars per hour for a ten hour time frame. However, because the experts can't agree on exactly when the peak will occur, there are two different little FLUXTIMATOR applets. The first one is based on the assumption that the peak occurs at 2h00m UT. The second one is based on the assumption that the peak occurs at 6h40m UT
I live in the mountains outside of Denver Colorado. Our time zone here is Mountain Standard Time(MST). MST is seven hours behind Coordinated Universal Time(UTC). So, MST = UTC - 7.
First, I put in "10 Quadrantis 02:00" - "Denver, US" - "Mountaintop" - "Jan 3-4, 2008" - "DST=No". In this case, the graph indicates that the "Peak Time: 04:16" and the peak rate is about 28.8 meteorites per hour. This is a little confusing to me, however, as I would expect that if the we are "Assuming the peak is at 2h00m UT", then I would back 7 hours out of that and I would assume that the peak time in Denver would be 7:00 p.m. MST on Jan 3rd.
Secondly, I put in "10 Quadrantis 06:40" - "Denver, US" - "Mountaintop" - "Jan 3-4, 2008" - "DST=No". In this case, the graph indicates that the "Peak Time:03:52" and the peak rate is about 52.7 meteorites per hour. In this second case, where we are "Assuming the peak is at 6h40m UT", I would assume that the peak would occur at 11:40 MST.
Can somebody tell me what I'm missing here?
I valued his Insight, feel very Informed, and reading it was Interesting.
...which makes me think I should AC it!
What it was not, was Offtopic.
THIS is, though.
Well, all that is very insightful and I dare say informative, but IMHO you're answering the wrong question.
If I read the GP question right, the question is what are _SETI_ scientists hoping to learn there. Since, you know, SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Those rocks probably didn't have much intelligent populations in the first place, since that tends to mean large multi-cellular organisms, not at most a few frozen bacteria in the cracks of a rock. And even if they had intelligent bacterial, it's a bit too late to learn anything while they're being vapourized at a few tens of thousands of degrees as their rock falls through the atmosphere.
Well, to be fair, I assume that a lot of the SETI people are astronomers and astrophysicists, so they can probably learn something relevant to _those_ domains. But, still, the mention of SETI in the summary seems to be a red herring at best, since anything they learn will likely be irrelevant to _SETI_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If I buy credits to offset my car, is a company buying those credits so they can pollute more? If that is the case, what's the point, the pollution is still there? Or, is somebody somewhere storing carbon?
I heard in 2007 that there was a serious threat of SETI being shut down for lack of funding.
If this is how they're spending it, they should be. I'm a staunch technophile, and I believe SETI is worth doing but a junket is a junket and wasted TAX DOLLARS is bullshit.
A ten hour flight in a government/private Gulfstream over the arctic to view a meteorite shower?
What, pray tell, do they expect to learn?
-Styopa
You gonna begrudge the nerds the perk of a little airplane ride? I'm sure there isn't much else in the way of perks for those guys.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Is it just me who cant understand why you would fly a plane (which is basically nothing more than an aluminum balloon pressurized at a much higher density than the atmosphere at that height) , through a meteor shower which hoping to get the best view of the largest meteor shower at the same time as not actually wanting to get hit by something which could do damage to the plane itself.
It seems to me that its kinda like going outside during a record hail storm and hoping not to get hit.
Hey Im all for science, but has anyone actually checked the "sanity" of the chief executive who authorised the flight, after all a well placed hole with a piece of meteor which is
a) flaming hot
b) flying at x thousand km/h ( or miles per hr if you prefer) after just coming through out atmosphere
could very knock out something kinda important like an engine, hydrologics, pilot etc like a hot knife through butter. Todays aircraft are generally safe, but isnt this just tempting fate just a tad?
Darren
I realize that in a 1" wide column that needs java enabled just to read that it's hard to get a lot of info in, especially if it stretches down for ten pages or so, but you think they could have made it a little more obvious when you could actually observe this "most dazzling meteor shower". Can anyone else figure out exactly when we're supposed to be seeing it?
I don't know why.... but this cracked me up. heh
A Gulfstream V aircraft will take off from San Jose, Calif...The primary goal of the lengthy airborne mission is to observe the Quadrantid meteor shower in ideal and virtually unchanging conditions...
Those ideal conditions specifically being the well-stocked supply of canapés and booze in that private jet.
47,000 feet, Exit Exit Exit.
(Mike Mullens, where are you?)
More or less. I used to monitor the operations of the DuPont (now Invista) nylon Common Offgas Abatement Unit in the UK. See page 15 of http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/2000/pdf/section5.pdf for an overview. As part of the work, we got set annually decreasing emissions targets which we had to meet. If you emitted less than them, you could sell the difference as credits. If you missed the targets, you had to either buy credits to make up for the difference, or shut down for the rest of the year. And the targets would be pro rated to the actual production rate so you couldn't just slow down production.
By having a free market for the trading of credits, a company can buy them to hedge the cost of reducing pollution, or even make it a profit centre where the cost of emission reduction is less than the cost of credits, as you can then sell the difference. Even if the net cost of reduction is still positive for the company, this may help to make a reduction project economical for other reasons - pollution represents wasted energy and materials that would be better used productively.
Since starting emissions trading in Europe, the price of credits has fallen dramatically indicating that the scheme is more successful than expected - the price will at equilibrium be equal to the average cost of plant changes resulting in reducing pollution by the same amount. As the year-on-year targets get stricter, this shows that pollution reduction continues, as otherwise supply would dry up and demand would increase.
OK, one obvious question: why the heck does SETI Institute sends people to watch a meteorite shower? They expect to see alien ships there or what?
As for what the SETI people are doing, 'in general', not even God knows that one...
You pegged my irony meter. Well done.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Listen to it here: http://science.nasa.gov/audio/meteor/navspasur.m3u This link is audio detected with an ICOM R-8500 receiver tuned to 217.927 MHz SSB. The antenna is a 13 element 220 MHz. beam pointed upward and to the east. The CW signal is from a Space Radar facility in Lake Kickapoo, TX, formally called NAVSPASUR. It is now operated by the USAF.
Must say, I'm impressed. Anyone under 40, these days, spells (and pronounces) it, 'Artic' which is actually an Articulated Lorry.