From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Feb 05 2003 - 07:58:42 PST
A SALUTE TO GALILEO AND FRIENDS OF PLANETARY DEFENSE
>From Andy Smith <astrosafe22000_at_yahoo.com>
Hello Benny and CCNet,
Galileo's birthday (15 Feb.) is an excellent time to salute the great
pioneer and the many friends of planetary defense (PD) who live and work in
Italy. All of us, in the global family of advocates, appreciate what you
have done and continue to do, in the interest of the safety of the human
race and planet Earth.
We share a common bond, which is our awareness of the great danger we face.
We also share the great responsibility of being members of the first
generation, in the history of life on this planet, with the capability to
fully understand the dangers and to prepare a defense. We stand on the
shoulders of more than 400,000 generations (a very tall pyramid) and we
"have the ball".
Thanks to Galilei Galileo, Max Wolf, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, Tom
Gehrels, Ted Bowell, Brian Marsden, Arthur Clarke, Karri Muinonen, Anatoly
Zaitsev, Michael Paine, Andrea Carusi, Vadim Simonenko, Don Yeomans, Steve
Ostro, Syuzo Isobe, Duncan Steel, Jay Tate, Andrea Milani, Jin Zhu, Fred
Whipple, Chris Aikman, Richard Binzel, Mario Carpino, Pete Worden, Eleanor
Helin and many, many others...from all over the Globe...we are making
progress and moving toward the day when we can truly feel secure about NEO
impact safety.
We, the people of this Planet, welcome this opportunity to thank you all for
your many contributions. We expecially want to thank the NEODyS team, the
SPACEGUARD team and everyone at the University of Pisa for the support they
have given to PD. Since the founding of the U.P., in 1472, there has been a
proud and growing tradition of excellence....and the leadership you have
shown, in this vital effort, brings credit to your country and to the human
race.
Finally, we want to salute the planners of MACE 2003, the international
Meeting on Asteroids and Comets in Europe, which will be held from 1-4 May,
in Mallorca. We wish you the best and we urge you, if possible, to post the
full agenda, with abstracts and e-mail addresses, and the presentations, if
possible, on the Web. Our 1995 Planetary Defense Workshop, the Russian
SPACE SHIELD (PDE) international conferences and several others have been so
posted and they have
proven to be of great value to the world community of specialists. We are
also hoping that the 2004 AIAA Planetary Defense Conference, in California,
will do the same. The Web is such a wonderful tool for the sharing of
information.
Cheers,
Andy Smith/International Planetary Protection Alliance
(IPPA)/ astrosafe22000_at_yahoo.com
===========
(7) METEOR STORM IN JUNE 1991?
>From Hossein Alizadeh <immgharib_at_hotmail.com>
Dear Benny,
I have a vast collection of meteor and meteorite lore which I have
discovered in Persian astronomical and historical manuscripts, including
several events over a period of 500 years which recall me of Tunguska class
events if it could have happened in a more dry climate. I am currently
working to arrange all of these in chronical order to be published in a
scholarly journal.
But what I am going now to report is the accounts of a hitherto unknown
meteor storm which my mother had observed in the dawn sky of June 28th 1991
while she was along my late father in their pilgrimage to Mecca. (Our elder
generation dreamed about making the once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca,
but our younger generations dream about admission to such prestigious
academic centers like New Mexico Tech, Caltech, UCLA and MIT!)
I have asked my mother to write down her observation in the Vol. 5 of my
hefty notebooks, all devoted to recording similar events of astronomical
interest. A verbatim translation from the original Persian is as this:
"On our way from Mecca to Medina [exactly to direction of the North] on the
highway I observed that a meteor shower began by the midnight, each one [of
the meteors] being 3 cm in length and some of those which rained where
smaller.
And our travel was began by Khordad 17th 1370 [June 7th 1991] and it lasted
for 31 days. We have been in Mecca for 21 days and for the rest of our
travel we have been in Medina. And from Medina we directly returned to
Tehran. [Then the night of the shower was by the dawn of the Friday June
28th 1991] I felt that the meteor shower was like a rain and perhaps lasted
for one hour. And the meteors directly rained toward the earth and no
oblique ones were observed. And I felt very sad and uneasy by seeing this,
because it was like a rain of fire, and I did not knew what the reason for
this rain was."
I have asked my mother about her seat in the bus and she says it was in the
left side seats, then her window in a Northward road should have provided a
view towards the West and since the bus ceiling blocked the upward view, she
probably could have a view up to a height of 75 of the western sky (25
degrees to the Zenith). By then the age of the Moon was 15 days and it was
placed in Sagittarius, low over the SSE horizon ,so moonlight might have
washed away the light of the fainter meteors.
About the Radiant of this meteor storm I just can make the rough guess that
probably it was within an area of the sky bordered by the constellations
Capricorn-Aquarius to the south and Cassiopeia-Cepheus to the north, which
interestingly is an approximate antipode to the general vicinity of the
constellation Taurus which homes the radiant of the now famous Taurid
daylight shower.
Also I have asked her questions to see if she was sure they could not have
been reflections of inside and outside lights, but she says she clearly can
differentiate between these.
My mother says the meteors she observed were colored orange-red ;like fire.
If this observation be genuinely about a meteor storm, then as it lasted for
about 1 hour, and during that period the Earth had been rotated by about 15
to the East, then we may expect that since she could only had a view towards
the West then the meteors might have been visible also in a slice of the
Earth stretching from Western Iran to Israel and Lebanon. I have tried to
locate any hint about a meteor storm by the dawn of June 27th 1991, without
any result up to know.
May anyone else have also observed this meteor storm?
Yours Sincerely
Hossein Alizadeh Gharib
immgharib_at_hotmail.com
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