Meteor Mission

摘要

For obvious reasons, you normally don't send a couple of aircraft to chase a comet. But on November 17, that's essentially what will happen as two planes rise from an airfield on the Pacific island of Okinawa and ascend into the moonless night. If all goes as planned, at an altitude of around 25,000 feet both planes will find themselves flying beneath what promises to be the biggest meteor storm of our lifetime—a storm caused by a hail of particles hitting Earth's atmosphere as our planet passes through the tail of a comet named 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. November 17 will be 304 days after the comet's nucleus has passed Earth, testimony to the length of the comet's tail.