By Jerry Knight
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 18, 1998; Page A18

The Leonid meteor showers yesterday spared communications satellites from the calamity some astronomers had predicted, but they dazzled skywatchers here and around the world.

As many as 200 meteoroids an hour – on the low side of most estimates – streaked through the atmosphere at the peak of the shower as the Earth swept through a vast cloud of debris left behind by the comet Temple-Tuttle.

Reston resident Andrew Guthrie, who said he's been watching the skies since he earned his Boy Scout astronomy merit badge more than 30 years ago, drove to Sky Meadows state park near Delaplane on Monday night to see the While the commercial satellite operators took precautions to dodge the meteoroids, amateur skywatchers went looking for them.

Leonids, named because they appear to come from the direction of the constellation Leo, the lion.

Guthrie said some of the meteors were so bright that he could see them streaking to Earth despite the bright lights on portions of Interstate 66, and he counted more than 200 hits in 3½ hours of watching.

"They cause long fiery arcs all across the sky," he said. "One left a smoke trail that I can still see when I close my eyes."

As the storm ebbed last night, satellite industry sources said they appeared to have avoided any disruptions of telephone, television, pager, navigation and other space-based services that have become parts of everyday life.

"So far the reports that I've gotten from NASA satellites are that all is quiet on the space front," said Don Savage, a space science spokesman at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Officials of Intelsat, Orbital Sciences Corp. and Iridium LLC, the Washington-based operators of constellations of satellites, said all their spacecraft appeared to have come through the storm undamaged.

All three had taken what Barron Beneski of Dulles-based Orbital Sciences called "prudent precautions" to protect their fleets, turning some satellites off and maneuvering others so their bus-size solar power panels would not be broadside to the incoming space dust.

But while the commercial satellite operators took precautions to dodge the meteoroids, amateur skywatchers went looking for them and space scientists took advantage of a rare opportunity to study materials that originated in the depths of space.

NASA sent specially equipped aircraft aloft to record the streaks made by the meteors as they burned up in the atmosphere. By analyzing the colors of the flames, scientists will try to figure out what's in the particles that range from the size of cigarette smoke particles to the diameter of a nickel.

American University astronomer Richard Berendsen said the Leonid meteor storm could provide ancient evidence for the young science of astrobiology – the study of the connection between life on earth and the cosmos.

Describing a comet as "a dirty snowball with a dry martini mixed in," he said the frozen comet begins to melt when it orbits from the dark reaches of space past the sun, boiling off liquids and the debris that become meteoroids.

When the earth collides with the vast trail of comet droppings, "it gives us an extraordinary opportunity at very low cost to examine stuff from off this planet."