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Meteor shower counter survives shaky first test By Bill Varble of the Mail Tribune Chris Crawford was high above Edwards Air Force Base on a NASA mission headed for the Leonid meteor shower when the killer problem struck: The special compiler he had built to count meteors wouldn't work! Anybody who's ever struggled with software errors can picture the plight of the civilian NASA asked along because he was the guy who built the computer. "If something goes wrong," Crawford told a reporter last month, "everybody will be looking at me saying, `Fix it right now."' And here it was. Crawford, 49, who lives near Jacksonville, is a software designer and amateur astronomer. In September he posted a message on an amateur astronomers' Web site hoping to recruit sky buffs to travel to New Mexico for the viewing conditions to see the Leonid shower, which is actually countless pieces of space junk left by Comet Tempel-Tuttle in the plane of the Earth's orbit. The annual shower appears to come from the constellation Leo; its most spectacular displays, including the one this year, roughly coincide with the comet's visits every 33 years. Dr. Peter Jenniskens, a NASA researcher at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, saw the post and contacted Crawford. The men made a deal. Crawford took a computer chip, added portals and built a compiler to record meteors. He would go on the NASA Leonid mission with several other civilians who would spot meteors. The human eye remains the last bastion of visual astronomy. Machines have replaced the eye in every other field of astronomy, but no instrument can match the eye's sensitivity for counting meteors, Crawford says. But how do you record the count? The 1999 Leonids were expected to be the mother of all meteor showers, with up to 2,000 an hour, an unimaginable and potentially uncountable total. So the plan was to hook six observers up to Crawford's compiler, give each an image intensifier tube for seeing and a mouse to punch in data. The mission was important for two reasons: Meteors have much to teach us about the origins of the solar system, and scientists hope to learn how to protect satellites from them. The mission left Edwards in Southern California Sunday, Nov. 14, in two specially outfitted Boeing 707s bound for Florida, England, Israel and the Azores. Now Crawford was battling computer demons. He transferred source code using a backup PowerBook. No go. Humming nervously, he did a test that pointed to a bug in the compiler, but it was a false lead. The errors kept changing their colors. The computer wouldn't write a file. It falsely claimed an SCSI bus error. Finally it reported "error 20002022." No such error existed; even the error reports were in error! When the plane landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, a desperate Crawford called Dave Walker, an old friend in Silicon Valley. The two figured there was some bad RAM and mapped a strategy minimizing RAM use. "With a little luck I might be able to squeeze everything into the motherboard," Crawford thought. Amazingly, it worked. After a day in England, the first data-taking event was the flight to Israel Tuesday. The equipment worked, although there was a glitch with a satellite uptake. Spotters saw 50 meteors an hour. By Wednesday in Israel, a jet-lagged Crawford hadn't had a good meal in days and hadn't been able to find a phone with a data port so he could send and receive e-mail (the Air Force bases had security concerns and old-style phones). But he seemed to have the compiler working as the plane rose above 10,000 feet, where counting started at 11:45 UT (universal time). "You don't have enough time to prove anything," Crawford says later of the tinkering he did with the compiler. "You do quickie calculations in your head." Crew members donned goggles and counted faster and faster, often clusters of three or four meteors a second. Such clusters were a big deal, theoretically. "I've been following this tiny controversy for 30 years," Crawford says. "The clusters suggest a number of things about how meteors break lose from a comet, which in turn tells us things about composition of comets." Some scientists think Earth was seeded with the organic compounds of life by comets. The rate hit 1,200 an hour. A Japanese crew videotaped spectacular fireballs. The rate neared 2,000. Crawford saw clumps of meteors marching across the field of view of the goggles. His finger got numb punching the mouse. Everything worked. Soon people were clapping each other on the back. Even Jenniskens used goggles to look at the reasons for all his planning. "Oh! Oh!" he said. "Ooh!" They counted 3,500 meteors an hour with the image enhancers, which translates to more than 2,000 to the naked eye under perfect conditions. Then counting started winding down, and the trip with it. On Thursday there was a press conference in the Azores, where Crawford announced they had seen 15,251 meteors. Flying back on Friday, the leading edge of the wings began generating big blue sparks that were instantly blown back over the wing. The eerie flame is caused by a static electricity discharge discovered by old-time sailors and called St. Elmo's fire. On the way over there'd been the aurora borealis. At first they were vague bands of light moving quickly. Seen through the image intensifier tubes, they were spectacular dancing pillars and curtains of flames in the ionosphere. The bottom moment of the journey was landing in Florida after the crew had been up all night only to find their hotel rooms weren't ready. "A whole bunch of us flopped on the floor and fell asleep," Crawford says. According to a new theory, we may not have to wait 33 years for the next spectacular Leonid shower. Crawford says a new model of meteor streams suggests that comets put out more globs of space junk than previously thought. If it's true, Comet Tempel-Tuttle could give Earth another big show in just two years. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA