Cooke will be part of the team that also includes members of the U.S. Air Force 50th Space Wing and Canadian meteor scientists. NASA, the Department of Defense, the European Space Agency, and commercial satellite companies like Iridium all support the project. The Leonids are the remains of comet Tempel-Tuttle which orbits the sun every 33 years in a direction opposite that of the planets and most other objects in the solar system. That means that even small grains from the Leonids can form large, energetic plasma clouds when they strike a satellite. The Leonids happen every year, but peak every 33 years after the comet has shed a fresh load of litter for Earth to sail through.
Older material is moved sunward by tidal effects of Jupiter and Uranus.
Records of the Leonids go back as far as 1799, and possibly 1100. Storms skipped 1899 and 1932, then roared back in 1966 with an incredible storm that peaked at 150,000 meteors an hour. Partly because of the 1966 showing, a few experts in 1998 issued dire warnings that satellites would be sandblasted. There is a degree of concern because this is the first meteor storm of the modern space age. Only a few dozen satellites were operating in 1966.