Asher/McNaught model gets timing right, strength wrong

While the secondary maxima might be attributed to specific dust trails other than the 1899 specimen that produced the main peak, the strength of that outburst is a real challenge for the dust model. Its fathers had always stressed that calculating the times was the easy part (involving mainly rigid celestial mechanics), while the forecasts of the ZHRs relied on reports from past storms. Now it seems likely that many of those had been underestimating the number of meteors in the sky by a factor of several - but whether the already high predictions for Leonid storms in 2001 and 2002 now need to be raised even higher, remains to be figured out.

Meteors were raining from the sky...

Other successful observing sites with similiarly high meteor rates and fine skies were in Israel and Egypt, while all around the Mediterranean and in Europe often bad weather prevailed (and the lower radiant also meant fewer meteors visible to the eye). The best locations here were in Southern France and Spain, while unexpected cloud holes could open anywhere anytime (such as in Darmstadt, Germany, and in some places on the North Sea coast), but mostly didn't. When the radiant rose in North America, the storm was already over, and most observers there felt that the early 1998 shower with its preponderance of fireballs (see Update # 111) has been a better display.

Ample science, strange numbers from international campaign

The scientific part of the operation, esp. the observations from the aircraft, seems to have gone very well, and lead scientist Peter Jenniskens was elated. But something went seriously wrong with the situational awareness part: The number for the maximum meteor rate the LEOC provided, 1688, was too low by at least a factor of 3, and the value of 2200 provided by the European Space Agency was too small as well. The Cosmic Mirror has learned from several sources involved in the campaign that the meteor counting had gone smoothly, be it visually or via intensified video feeds (as on the planes) - but that the conversion of these data into a precise ZHR value has apparently failed. It's thus still a long way to a fully automated worldwide network of meteor watching machines (that the USAF already dreamt about last year).

And that was only the beginning: Soon Pedro Valdes Sada reported two lunar flashes that he videorecorded near Monterrey, Mexico, about half an hour after the event seen by Brian Cudnik - and those flashes are on Dunham's tape as well. And finally David Palmer reported two more lunar impacts that he videotaped at his home in Greenbelt, Marylandi - again also visible in the video recording Dunham made at Mount Airy, about 60 km to the northwest. That brought the total to five confirmed lunar impacts: four on Dunham's tape and also on videotapes made by others, and the other, the first one reported, confirmed with Brian Cudnik's timed visual observation.

"Brian Cudnik reports that the flash he saw was yellowish-orange in color," writes Dunham, "redder than nearby psi1 Aquarii. All of the videorecordings are black-and-white. A third probable untimed visual confirmation of that event has been provided by Steve Hendrix, who watched the dark side of the Moon with a 4.5-inch Meade telescope from Cameron, Missouri. [...] Before hearing about Cudnik's and my description of the flash, Hendrix was hesitant to share his observation since he had 'never seen anything like this before and didn't want to appear over zealous'."

Galileo engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sprang into action, scrambling to send new commands to the spacecraft and bring it out of safe mode in order to save the flyby. "With so little time to spare, it would have been easy to think 'no way' can we do this," said Galileo project manager Jim Erickson. "But our team members jumped to the challenge, in some cases leaving behind half-eaten Thanksgiving dinners." The team finished sending new computer commands to Galileo, which were received and executed by the spacecraft at 4:45 UTC, four minutes after the closest approach. This enabled the spacecraft to complete more than half of its planned observations of Io and its plasma torus and all the planned observations of Europa!

The planet of HD 209458, yet another 'hot Jupiter', was first detected with the classical radial velocity method by Geoffrey Marcy and colleagues on Nov. 5. As with all new planets they detect, the team immediately brought it to the attention of collaborator Greg Henry, an astronomer who conducts research with several automatic telescopes. Henry turned one of them on the star at the time Marcy had predicted the planet would cross the face of the star if the planet's orbital plane were lucky enough to carry it between Earth and the star. And for the first time it worked: On Nov. 7 Henry observed a 1.7 percent dip in the star's brightness! Now we know precisely that the planet's mass is 0.63 Jupiters, and from the transit light curve we also know that it has 1.6 times Jupiter's diameter. It probably didn't form in its present location, just 7 mio. km from the star, but has migrated there.

While China calls the Shenzhou "completely indigenous", American experts in particular are convinced that China simply paid Russia (a lot) for sharing its 40 years of experience. And even Chinese media are now reporting about a "secret accord signed with Russia following President Boris Yeltsin's 1996 visit." During the test flight the capsule carried a dummy 'taikonaut' and many instruments - the analysis of the flight data should be taking several months now. Other 'payloads' included various flags, seeds and stamps...

Deconvolved images display a nearly-contact binary system: The two distinct lobes are of similar size and magnitude (flux ratio is around 0.8) with a separation estimated to 0.125 arcsec, close to the diffraction limit of the 3.6 m telescope. Kleopatra is thus comprised of two similarly sized lobes, neither of which is small enough to be called a moon. Such asteroid binaries raise questions about their origin: Some are thought to have been knocked from other larger bodies, others might be congealed piles of space rubble left over from the initial formation of the solar system.