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."

Comments

SETI Scientists?

[pushing-robot]

What are they doing, exactly? Seeing if the rocks are intelligent? Making sure the planet isn't being seeded by aliens?

Re:Star Light, Star Bright

[blueg3]

They have high-powered telescopes in areas with low light pollution, but these telescopes have a fixed position. Over the course of 10 hours, the Earth rotates quite a bit (10/24ths!), so the area of the Earth that is prime for observing the meteors moves over a large distance during the course of the shower.

Planes can also fly above weather, whereas telescopes cannot see through many weather phenomena.

Given the kind of costs that research entails, a flight like this probably isn't all that expensive.

If you're in the right place you can help

[szyzyg]

If you've got a decent camera and you're in the right place, at the right time, then you can potentially photgraph some meteors, and possibly collect useful data for meteor researchers. If a meteor trail is imaged from multiple ground locations then the trajectory can be reconstructed.

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.

Re:Star Light, Star Bright

[Cecil]

Light pollution is a problem even for the largest observatories. There is virtually no regulation. The best they can do is buy up as much surrounding land as possible or ensure it's a protected natural environment preserve. But even the largest observatories are facing problems where the surroundings have become increasingly densely populated and light polluted over the years.

You can see the light dome for Calgary from 200 kilometers away, and Calgary has done a lot of work to reduce light pollution, being the first major metropolitan area in the world to replace all streetlight shades with full-cutoff models. It helps that the land is pretty flat here, but still. It's a very difficult problem to avoid, and it doesn't help that we largely don't even bother to try.