"We all felt like we needed to put on 'hard hats'! The sky was absolutely full of meteors," recalls astronomer Jim Young of JPL's Table Mountain Observatory. Earth had just plunged into a debris stream trailing comet Tempel-Tuttle; the resulting meteor storm, the 1966 Leonids, was literally dazzling.

This weekend it could happen again.

On March 1, 2003, around 2154 universal time (UT), our planet will encounter a stream of dusty comet debris "only 12,000 km from Earth. That's as close as the Leonid debris stream was in 1966," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Space Environments Team.

Earth is approaching a cometary debris stream that might trigger an unusual Antarctic meteor shower this weekend | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference