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Weekend Lyrid Meteor Shower Visible From Earth
jamaicaplain writes "The annual Lyrid meteor shower will hit its peak this weekend and promises to put on an eye-catching display. NASA scientists plan to track the Lyrid meteor shower using a network of all-sky cameras on Earth, as well as from a student-launched balloon in California. Meanwhile, an astronaut on the International Space Station will attempt to photograph the meteors from space."
Wait; a lot of meteors are going to burn up when they hit Earth's atmosphere and it will be visible from Earth? Who'd have thought?
would someone, for the love of heavens, please explain to me why they always miss out 1 peice of info: from which location on earth and which timezone!!!!
i think this is such 2nd or 3rd story i am getting on slashdot. everytime i went to nasa website, watch damn videos and could never understand when and where on earth (srsly no pun) can i expect it!!!
please enlighten me if someone knows
(at my location this time already passed 12 hours ago)
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
Since the atmosphere is thinner than Earth's, any meteorite coming in at 25,000 km/hour isn't going to be slowed down or burnt up.
It's going to be more like shrapnel than sprinkle.
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From TFA (albeit about 2/3 down the page)
Lyrid meteor skywatchers with good weather should venture outside in the late-night hours Saturday or early Sunday, preferably after midnight to catch the sky show around its peak, which occurs at 1:30 a.m. EDT (0530 GMT). You should allow up to 40 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness.
The comet produces a band of debris. The Earth's orbit crosses the band of debris. Pretending that the band of debris is fixed, we get an Earth that is crossing through the band very, very slowly, while rotating. So, no matter where you are on Earth, your section of sky crosses through the densest part of the debris at 0100-0300. That is why they never include location, or if they do, it is location followed by GMT.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Earth meteors tend to burn up at a very high altitude (75 to 100 km) where the air pressure is about 11 micro bars at 80 km and scale height of 7km. Since 11 ubars is much lower pressure than the atmosphere at Mar's surface which is about 6 mbar (6000 mbar), the meteors should still burn up but at a lower altitude on Mars than Earth.