The atmosphere protects Earth from most meteors, which travel so fast (25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour) that they heat up and burn up once they enter the upper atmosphere, the same fate that most space junk eventually faces.
The lowest layer of the atmosphere TroposphereIt is about 10-15 kilometers (6-9 miles) thick. The troposphere is where weather occurs. The next layer is stratosphereThe ozone layer extends from the top of the troposphere (the tropopause) to 50 km (31 mi). Most of the ozone layer is in the stratosphere. Mesosphere It lies above the stratosphere, reaching an altitude of 85 km (53 miles). Thermosphere They can then travel up to hundreds of miles, with most meteors burning up in the thermosphere at altitudes of 80-120 km (50-75 miles).
Figure C shows a photograph of the atmosphere and Earth’s surroundings taken on October 27, 2016, over Patagonia. This amazing image The photo was taken by astronauts on the International Space Station’s Expedition 49 crew while in orbit 400 km (250 miles) above the South Atlantic Ocean.
Look closely and you’ll see layers similar to those detected by a crepuscular photometer. The red and orange layer is the troposphere, stained brightly by dust from the desert below. The Patagonian tropopause is at an altitude of about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles), and the fuzzy brown, blue, and white layer above the troposphere represents the stratosphere, which is typically much more uniform in appearance.
Figure D shows an intensity scan overlaid on a narrow section of the photograph in Figure C. This scan was analyzed using ImageJ image analysis software ( Image j.nih.gov/ij). Estimated vertical scale correction factor Yeah The axis assumes that the top of the orange-red layer is the tropopause. This means that the top of the stratosphere is Yeah There is an axis, and this is where the mesosphere begins.
The intensity scan in Figure D clearly shows a dust layer in the troposphere and an unknown aerosol layer in the stratosphere. I have done hundreds of crepuscular photometer scans of the evening sky and even very small undulations suggest the presence of aerosols, so the small bumps seen in the mesosphere scan are probably caused by aerosols.
Figure E is a crepuscular photometer profile from the Geronimo Creek Air Monitoring Station near my office. You can see a thick layer of dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa. This dust reaches my site most summers. My photometer also detects smoke, smog, and even volcanic plumes, such as those from Raikoke Volcano in Russia.
