Earth will enter the heavier parts of the stream at about 11 p.m. EST on Nov. 17 (0400 GMT Nov. 18). Activity will peak around 5 a.m. EST Nov. 18 (1000 GMT), when as many as 13 meteors per minute could be visible, likely for a stretch of time that lasts less than one hour.
No larger than a grain of sand, the Leonid meteroids tend to vaporize at about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. Satellites, however, are orbiting the planet much higher and so could be hit by the bits before they burned up.
Satellites that orbit between 200 and 600 miles (325 and 965 kilometers) above Earth will face meteor rates roughly the same as what is expected to be seen from the ground, Cooke said.
However, high-flying geostationary satellites, which sit 22,300 miles (35,900 kilometers) above the planet will be closer to the densest part of the debris stream. Moreover, geostationary satellites in the Western Hemisphere would be at the greatest risk, Cooke said.
Because Tempel-Tuttle orbits the Sun in the opposite direction compared to Earth -- a backward motion called retrograde -- its debris would hit a satellite with much greater velocity than other meteors created by the debris from other comets.
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"It's like two cars hitting head-on," Cooke said, adding that the penetration power is 16 times that of a normal meteor.
The greatest danger, Cooke says, is the generation of a plasma cloud -- a byproduct of high-speed impacts that could cause an electrical short circuit.
When a meteor as fast as a Leonid strikes something, it vaporizes, creating a cloud of plasma, or electrically charged particles. An electrical current can then flow from one part of the craft, through the plasma cloud, and then destroy an instrument on another part of the craft.
Few such instances have been documented.
In 1993, during the August Perseid meteor shower, a meteor hit an Olympus communications satellite. The impact formed a plasma cloud, and the craft's attitude control system was zapped. By the time operators could stabilize it, they had depleted all of its attitude-control propellant and the satellite was lost
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