The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which judges world records for aeronautic travel, uses the Kármán line - set at 100 kilometers above sea level - to denote the “edge of space.” NASA considers a space traveler to be an astronaut when they climb higher than 50 miles above the planet’s surface.
The moon, the farthest point ever reached by astronauts, orbits well within the geocorona.Īll of this challenges the way we see our planet’s borders. It does mean, however, that humankind has yet to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. Any spacecraft traveling through it wouldn’t notice a thing or be slowed by drag. The hydrogen molecules that make up the outer atmosphere are so sparse that this region is still considered a vacuum. This doesn’t mean you can go moonwalking without a spacesuit, said Jean-Loup Bertaux, a study coauthor and planetologist. The report concludes that the edges of the atmosphere actually extend more than 391,000 miles from the planet’s surface, about twice as far as our moon.
Now, a new study from Space Physics redefines the boundaries of our planet, based on overlooked data collected at the end of the last millennium. For more than half a century, even before the Apollo 16 mission captured the first ultraviolet images of Earth, researchers knew that the outermost atmospheric layer - the geocorona - extends far beyond the denser, surface-level air that we breathe.
#Pictures of the firmament skin
The Earth’s atmosphere is described as a fragile coat wrapping around the planet, comparable in scale to an apple’s skin protecting the fruit.
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