SPACE: LEONID METEOR SHOWER

(18 Nov 1999) English/Nat

The Leonid meteor shower produced the most visible display of shooting stars in 33 years.

The best place to see the flashy fireballs was in the Arabian desert.

Other parts of the world got a more subdued show.

Researchers from NASA took to the skies to observe the celestial event from a research plane.

No matter where you were early on Thursday morning, the Leonid meteor shower proved to be quite a show.

NASA researchers took these pictures of the celestial event from an on board a research plane.

The global average peaked on Wednesday night, with astronomers reporting a storm of about 17-hundred meteors per hour.

One researcher aboard the flight explained the significance of the storm.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"This is some real rare data that we will never ever again get the chance to obtain for studies of the origin of life, how extraterrestrial matter was brought to the earth. We had for ten minutes a window on how the sky looked like four million years ago."
SUPER CAPTION: Peter Jenniskens, NASA Researcher

The shower formed from dust and ice pellets shed by the comet Temple-Tuttle.

They streak into the earth's atmosphere at 40 miles-per-second and burn up.

The shooting stars can appear anywhere in the sky, but most appear to come from the direction of the constellation Leo, which gives the storm its name.

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