Canada's Department of National Defence, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and NASA also are kicking in money for the Leonid monitoring.
The 1999 Leonid effort is a triumph over bureaucratic wrangling. While the U.S. and Canadian military want to gather real-time data to protect their satellites, the civilian space agencies are eager to learn more on Earth's atmospheric chemistry.
"Comets are made of materials formed long before life existed on Earth," says Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, who will be observing the Leonids in the Canary Islands.
"Understanding them may help us understand how life evolved on our planet."
Military and scientists cooperate this year
Military officials, however, are less concerned about the development of life than the more immediate question of whether the tiny particles will disrupt their critical spacecraft--such as spy satellites.
Last year, NASA and the Defense Department failed to integrate their programs because of these competing goals, but this year the two groups have joined forces in order to ensure a more comprehensive observing effort.
"We finally agreed to work together," says one Air Force official.
The most ambitious part of the observing program is an 18,000-mile mission which begins Saturday from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The one-week series of flights will take the aircraft to Britain, Israel and then west again during the peak night of Wednesday and Thursday. After a stop in the Azores on the morning of the 18th, the planes will continue west, arriving back at Edwards November 20.
Flying above the predictable November weather in an a formation of about 100 kilometers apart, the on-board team of 50 scientists with 25 crew will have clear views and a chance to gather stereoscopic data on the meteors, says Major Tracy Phelps, an aircraft commander.
That data will allow researchers to pinpoint more exactly the brilliance, angle and altitude of the Leonids.
Aircraft altered for research
Both aircraft -- operated by the Air Force's 452nd flight test squadron at Edwards -- have been painstakingly modified in recent months to hold dozens of sophisticated instruments.
One of the planes -- a KC135-E FISTA (for Flying Infrared Signature Technology Aircraft)-- has 20 viewing ports facing upwards. The main instruments on board are two infrared detectors which can detect heat in objects such as meteors.
Another eight instruments cover the visible and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The sister plane is a Boeing 707 -- called the Advanced Ranging and Instrumentation Aircraft -- outfitted with a telemetry antenna dish in its nose to relay data to NASA satellites and then to Marshall.
Air Force technicians are installing an additional four windows to the plane's current four to provide room for additional instruments, including near ultraviolet and visible-light spectrographs which NASA researchers hope could spot evidence of organic matter in the Leonids.
NASA officials call the flight the first mission of the agency's ambitious astrobiology program, which aims at understanding the development of life in the universe.
From Canada to the Canary Islands
On the ground there will be seven primary observing posts. Brown's team of researchers is now in place in northern Canada, in the Negev desert in southern Israel and on the Canary Islands.
Special equipment also is in place in Hawaii, on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and in Florida. The sites will use both radar and electro-optical telescopes to capture images of the Leonids.
Meanwhile, a bevy of both amateur and professional meteor watchers will gather Sunday at two sites each in France, Spain and Portugal --considered excellent viewing sites because skies are likely to be clear and the position of the Earth at the estimated peak of the shower or storm.
Each site will have back-up generators and phone and Internet connections to relay data. And it will be a truly international effort: in southern Spain, for example, the team will be made up of Dutch, Czech and Spanish scientists.
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