This year, scientists pre-dicted the Leonid meteor shower would give stargazers across Asia – and especially in clear-skied Mongolia — the show of a lifetime on the night of November 17-18.

Now they admit they were wrong.

The shower did produce a spectacular display of orange fireballs streaking across the night sky "like God’s own fireworks," in the words of one observer.

Unfortunately, it hap-pened one night early — leaving the scientists who came to Mongolia to monitor the event embarrassed and bemused.

"We didn’t expect that," admits Col. Simon Worden, Deputy for Battle Space Dominance with the U.S. Air Force and a member of the Canadian-American team. "It’s very unusual."

The event defied all the scientists’ predictions. There were far more big, flaming meteors than anticipated. But there was nothing like the 1000 to 10,000 meteors per hour the experts had pre-dicted.

In the last major Leonid storm, in 1966, more than 100,000 meteors per hour were visible during the peak.

It was bad news for those who braved a bitter -25 celsius night in the hope of seeing celestial fireworks. But it was good news for global tele-communications. The scien-tific team came to Mongolia in an attempt to prevent a meteoroid hitting one of the 600 satellites in orbit around the earth.

Their data, fed back to the U.S. Air Force’s 55th Space Weather Squadron in Color-ado, was designed to aid mili-tary and commercial satellite operators in repositioning or switching off their satellites to avoid damage.

"When you send a weather plane out to survey a hurricane, sometimes the good news is to tell them there is no hurricane," says Worden. "This has pro-vided the data we need to tell our satellite operators that this is not a crisis for them this year.

"As an Air Force satellite operator I’m very pleased. As a scientist, I naturally want to see fireworks in the sky.

"This was not a bust scien-tifically. It’s a very successful scientific expedition."

It is nonetheless an em-barrassment for the scientists. As late as 1 am local time — one hour before the anticipated peak — astronomers at Ulaan-baatar’s Khurel Togoot ob-servatory were predicting a "modest storm" of upwards of 1000 meteors per hour.

Two hours later, with their high-tech cameras recording between 50 and 100 meteors per hour, they admitted this was unlikely.

To make things worse, an accident knocked out the sat-ellite phone at the team’s second site, 50 kilometres south of Ulaanbaatar, and a fire destroyed one of the camp’s three gers. Two Mongolian scientists sustained minor burns in the incident.

The event has highlighted how little scientists know about the behaviour of meteoroid streams, the ribbons of space dust that surround comets.

"We don’t understand the phenomenon well enough," says Worden. "Comets are strange things."

"This is a very inexact science," notes Daniel Fischer, a German science writer and member of a team of 15 Ger-man amateur astronomers who spent the night of the shower clad in arctic suits and lying in the snow.

"Some say that because the historical evidence is so poor, nobody should make any pre-dictions, period."

The anticlimax has made some wonder why the experts’ predictions were so effusive.

Much of the $1 million bill for the Leonid ’98 observation programme was picked up by the U.S. military, concerned about the impact on satellites of space dust speeding toward the earth at 71 kilometres a second. Other money was chipped in by unnamed com-mercial satellite operators.

The heavy publicity and cash inflow generated by the pre-Leonid hype has given a big boost to meteor research.

Worden — who as former head of technology for the star wars weapons programme knows all about threats from space — argues this is crucial.

"We’re putting a lot of eggs in satellite baskets, so we have to put a lot more study into this. We’re trying to figure out whether we have problems with this sort of phenomenon."

Now the scientists believe next year’s Leonid display may be the once-in-a-lifetime show. But they’re not certain — yet.