According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling.
The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion velocity meter and a planar Langmuir probe to measure activity in the ionosphere, which can interfere with radar and satellite transmissions. Since its launch in April,
From the BBC:
One of C/NOFS’s first discoveries has been simply to identify where precisely in the sky the ionosphere is right now; and it is a lot lower than expected.
During the night it has been detected at about 420km, rising to 800km during the day. Scientists here at the American Geophysical Union meeting said more typical values would be 640km during night-time and about 960km during the day.
Story via Harper’s Weekly Review.
Image via Lost Rubbish.
1 response so far ↓
1 B // Dec 23, 2008 at 2:49 pm
But the question is whether this will kill us faster than global warming. Maybe we can stop it with more carbon emissions. Quick! To the Prime Minister’s Office!
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