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Re: (meteorobs) Re: Leonids meteor shower
Dr. Luigi Foschini wrote:
>I would like to point out that the damages from a meteoroid impact are
>of several types, such as the pure mechanical damage, the plasma
>production, and electromagnetic interferences.
Thanks for your contribution, Dr. Foschini! Your characterization of the
physical threat to artificial satellites from meteoroid impacts agrees closely
with that on the NASA (Jenniskens) Leonids site at:
http://www-space.arc.nasadot gov/~leonid/hazard.html
Thanks also for the review reference!
And looking over the NASA site, it seems that Dr. Jenniskens results support
the general statement that the LIKELIHOOD of substantial impacts with any one
satellite is vanishingly small, even during a ZHR=100000 storm!
According to the graph at:
http://leroy.cc.ureginadot ca/%7Eastro/Leonids/leoflun.GIF
even during a 10 hour storm with a ZHR of 100,000 (an APPROXIMATION to 1833
levels, at least), the flux of 1/100th mg meteoroids or larger would be less
than 1 per 10,000 square meters. I'm probably making some unstatistical leaps
here, but that seems to translate to 10 microscopic (or slightly larger)
particles per square kilometer per hour...
I'm not saying impacts CAN'T happen: just that they seem mighty unlikely!
Clear skies all!
Lew
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