A severe meteor storm expected to peak in November will challenge the world's satellites with an unusually dense flurry of space dust, creating the greatest threat of a meteor impact since 1966, NASA scientists said Monday.

The Leonid meteor shower occurs annually but is forecast by some experts this year to be a storm unlike anything seen in recent decades. The last time the Leonids produced what astronomers call a storm, only a handful of satellites orbited Earth and confronted the threat.

Now, hundreds of satellites will be at risk, providing services ranging from pagers and television to weather forecasts and monitoring for potential nuclear blasts by rogue nations.

Forecasts for the number of meteors per hour during this year's peak on Nov. 18 range from 1,400 to 15,000, reflecting wide disagreement in methods used by various scientists to predict the potential of the November shower of "shooting stars."

Bill Cooke of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center told SPACE.com that the odds of a satellite being damaged during the peak hours of the Leonid meteor shower are between 1-in-10,000 and 1-in-1,000. Overall, at least one satellite could be significantly damaged during the entire storm which spans several days, Cooke said.

For satellite operators, there's not a whole lot that can be done.

Cooke said preparations will likely mirror recent efforts, in which many satellites are simply "put to sleep" during the storm and operators hope for the best. Craft also are rotated to turn their slimmest profiles into the oncoming stream of meteors.

Telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope are designed to be maneuvered frequently and easily. Some smaller satellites are not.

In 1999, the last year that a strong Leonids meteor shower was predicted, satellite operators effectively put many of their spacecraft into hibernation (turning off or minimizing data collecting and sending operations) while still maintaining critical services here on Earth.

That year, Cooke headed up a Leonids Environment Operations Center at Marshall, where 26 engineers gathered radar data from the Arctic to Israel to the middle Pacific and provided continuous alerts to satellite operators. This year, a scaled-back operation will involve just a few people who will provide updates once an hour based on two meteor-detecting radar devices running in the United States and Canada.

"We discovered in 1999 that people batten down the hatches and ride things out," Cooke said. "If you've done this, there ain't much more you can do."

Satellites emerged unscathed in 1999, but the risk is five to 10 times greater this year, Cooke said. For several hours around the peak, roughly ten meteors will fill every square kilometer (0.62 miles) of sky at any given moment.

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 is burned off the comet's nucleus by a wind of charged particles that stream outward from the Sun.

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.

"It's like two cars hitting head-on," Cooke says, 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.