The comet swings around the sun once every 33 years, leaving a trail of dust. Each November, the Earth’s orbit takes it through that slowly dissipating trail.

Leonid Meteor Shower, are the streaks of light produced when small, dust particles shed by comets orbiting the Sun, run into the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporise in a few seconds at altitudes of about 100 km.

The shower is visible every year around mid-November when the Earth moves through the Leonid meteor stream that comprises solid particles known as meteoroids, ejected by the comet as it passes by the heat source of the Universe – the Sun. In reality all the entire meteor streaks are parallel, but by appearance they appear to originate from a single point in the sky.

According NASA officers, and other astronomers USA is going to have a shower of 20-30 meteors per hour while the Asian region will get around 200-300 meteors an hour. The best time to watch the meteor shower in USA is after 1:30 a.m. EST up to before sunrise.? Leonid meteor shower travels with a speed of 71 km per second with a visible diameter of 1mm to 1cm.

The Atlantis space shuttle was fueled up ov Monday for its mission to ferry six astronauts and tons of spare parts to the International Space Station.

Atlantis is slated to lift off at 2:28 p.m. ET from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.


Atlantis’ STS-129 mission will be an 11-day trek to the orbiting laboratory to deliver two massive platforms packed with spare parts, including pump modules, gyroscopes, a high-pressure gas tank, a latching end for the station’s robotic arm, battery equipment, a cargo transportation container, and more. In all, Atlantis will carry about 27,250 pounds (12,360 kilograms) worth of supplies.

Overnight, forecasters reduced the chances of acceptable weather for launch slightly, from 90 percent to 70 percent. “Our primary concern for launch is a low cloud ceiling,” meteorologists said in their Monday morning update.

The supply run is vital to pave the way for the future, when NASA plans to retire the space shuttles and give up their capacity to carry large hardware to space.

Since man first touched our natural satellite ‘the moon’ and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA’s LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.
Where the water comes from?
- Go to Space.com to find out the answer.
[via space.com] [image via Google]