At 5 p.m. EST on Monday, a team of 26 engineers, astronomers and Air Force personnel will set up camp at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under the direction of Bill Cooke, meteor man of the moment.

Meanwhile, in a frigid bunker far north of the Arctic Circle where the sun never shines this time of year, four volunteers will aim a radar device toward the heavens. They will report whatever they find to Cooke and his team, who will be cozily huddled around their computer screens back in Huntsville, Alabama.

And in Israel, the Canary Islands, Key West, Hawaii and a tiny atoll in the Central Pacific, scientists will point video equipment into the night sky. For 90 hours, this worldwide team of experts will report what they see to Cooke's Leonids Environment Operations Center.

Researchers say a tiny meteor could poke holes in solar panels, pit camera lenses, blast reflective coating off mirrors or damage computers. While some military satellites are better shielded (because they are built to withstand nuclear assault), many spacecraft are more vulnerable.

The last time Earth experienced a major meteor shower -- in 1966 -- there were but a handful of satellites. Now there are nearly 600, doing everything from relaying phone calls to providing critical information for weather forecasters and the military. More satellites mean higher odds of an impact.

"There is a degree of concern because this is the first meteor storm of the modern space age," Cooke said.

Though Cooke and others say the chances of impact-related damage are slim -- something on the order of 1-in-10,000 or less -- the Leonid meteors travel in the opposite direction compared with Earth and its satellites, setting the stage for head-on collisions at terrific speeds.

The Leonids are caused by dust and debris left behind by the comet Tempel-Tuttle, which passes through the inner solar system every 33 years. The debris, burned off the comet by the solar wind, travels around the sun too. But because Tempel-Tuttle orbits in the opposite direction compared to Earth -- a backward motion called retrograde -- the stream of debris is coming at us much more quickly than if we were moving in the same direction.

The grains of dust that make up the Leonids are zipping along at 72 kilometers per second -- or 260 times the speed of sound -- relative to Earth and its satellites. Cooke says this is about four times faster than most meteoroids we might encounter. (Meteors from other sources enter the atmosphere every day.)

"It's like two cars hitting head-on," Cooke said, adding that the penetration power is 16 times that of a normal meteor.

Impacts and the resulting pits and divots they would create can easily damage fragile satellites. A camera lens or mirror is compromised with any blemish larger than half a millimeter or so -- easily accomplished by a high-speed meteor. And at such high speeds, even a tiny speck can cause a momentum change that some satellites might not be able to overcome, forcing a tumble that would render the instruments useless.

But the greater threat, Cooke said, 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, Cooke said. This creates a cloud of plasma, consisting of 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 -- not unlike the damage caused by a lightning strike.

Cooke said the high-speed Leonids pack 256 times the plasma-producing potential as regular meteors. And though the odds of an impact are low, it has happened before.

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.

Much of this year's effort to protect satellites involves simply having people in place to react quickly if any problems develop.

Cooke and his team at NASA will relay what they know about the strength and severity of the expected storm to any interested satellite operator. The team includes participants from the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the European Space Agency, Canadian meteor scientists, and commercial satellite companies.

On a non-public website, tables of data will tell engineers the severity of the storm in the part of the sky where their satellites are located. A special program continually re-calculates the risk of impact to a craft in a given location.

Engineers say among the more vulnerable parts on a satellite are the arrays of solar panels, which are typically the bulk of a satellite's "footprint" in space. Some of the arrays are as large 9 feet wide x 20 feet long (2.7 meters x 6.1 meters).

Some orbiting spacecraft, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, are designed to be moved around.

These satellites will be re-oriented to point their smallest profiles into the stream of meteors, thereby reducing the chances of getting hit. When possible, solar arrays will be angled "edge-on" into the stream.

To protect against the plasma cloud, several satellite operators plan to turn off or tone down non-critical components. In a sense, much of Earth's satellite network will be half asleep, though engineers stress that your pager will work and your TV broadcast should arrive uninterrupted.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates the satellites that keep an eye on the world's weather, engineer Tim Walsh says that after two years of preparation, they're ready. Equally important, he stresses, they are not expecting any problems.

"The worst thing that could happen is the spacecraft losing track of the Earth, if there's a large enough momentum change," Walsh told space.com. But he added that such scenario is not expected.

Two 4,600-pound Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) orbit the planet in fixed perches 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) up -- one keeping constant watch over the Pacific, the other eyeing the Atlantic. These are the satellites that provide dramatic hurricane shots as well as the daily weather images that have become a staple on the evening news.

The GOES satellites cannot be re-oriented, Walsh said, because their orbits are too sensitive. But other precautions will be taken, mostly along the lines of safeguarding the craft in the event of a strike.

Walsh said extra gyros, which take a couple hours to warm up, will be turned on in advance, allowing for more rapid maneuvering if necessary after any possible impact. On the ground, an extra dozen engineers will be called in during the expected peak hours of the meteor storm -- between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Wednesday.

"Everybody is hoping for the best and preparing for the worst," Walsh said. "I think we're ready."

If the worst were to occur, NOAA has a back-up. Hovering above Texas is GOES 9, which though "not in perfect condition," could be awakened from hibernation if either of the other GOES satellites were damaged. Ironically, a brand new backup GOES satellite was due to be launched in early November, but launch-vehicle problems have kept the satellite grounded, probably until early next year.

If you lose ESPN or the CBS Evening News on Wednesday night, you can bet the engineers at PanAmSat will be scrambling. The company operates 19 satellites serving these customers, plus the Weather Channel, Discovery Channel, the Golf Channel and a host of others.

But PanAmSat's vice president of engineering, Bridget Neville said no such problems are expected.

"I really don't have any concerns," Neville told space.com. "We anticipate the possibility of an impact being so small, and we're prepared to handle it if it does happen."

Systems and software will be adjusted to minimize the chances of an outage, and onboard gyros will be turned on in advance to prepare for any needed recovery movements.

Intelsat, an organization that operates 23 satellites that carry voice, data and video to more than 200 countries, plans to call in extra engineers, re-orient satellites to reduce profiles and turn down non-critical components. Vice president of operations, Ramu Potarazu said the company "learned a lot" from last year's Leonids, and has put into place procedures that are now standard.

"I think it will be a non-event," Potarazu said, adding that the company plans to provide uninterrupted service to its customers, which include Comsat, British Telecom and China Telecom. If a satellite were lost or damaged, its functions could be switched to another in the fleet, Potarazu said.

Engineers say satellites probably get hit frequently during normal conditions, with little consequence. At a conference earlier this year sponsored by the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, several satellite operators reported that sensors aboard their satellites detected impact with the tiny meteoroids, but no satellite was reported seriously damaged.

During the Apollo lunar landing program, NASA wanted to know the meteor hazard to manned spacecraft, so engineers outfitted the upper stages of three Saturn 1 rockets with immense wings that spread in orbit. The wings were designed specifically to record meteor impacts.

During the last Leonid meteor storm, in 1966, when some 150,000 meteors per hour were observed during the peak, the wings recorded one impact, but that occurred on the side of the Earth opposite the Leonid stream -- no impacts occurred in the direct path of the stream. "One impact when you're seeing 150,000 an hour gives you an idea of the relative threat," Cooke said. "That is, there's not much of a threat at all."

Experts this year expect only 1,000 to 5,000 meteors per hour at the peak.

While satellite protection is the main purpose bringing the world's astronomers and engineers together for 90 hours this week, there's another, lesser-known motivation -- pure science. Researchers expect that all this measuring will provide insight into how comets and meteor streams form and evolve. And such an understanding bears on an even more important topic:

"Comets are made of materials formed long before life existed on Earth," said Peter Brown, who is leading the Canadian Leonids effort from the University of Western Ontario. "Understanding them may help us understand how life evolved on our planet."