Sunday, May 25, 2008

Entering the Atmo

4:47 pm PDT: Comm Central just counted down the entry into the atmosphere, to the second.

How can that be? Surely the atmo thins out as 1/r^2, or maybe an exponential. How can they call the boundary that sharply??

Posted by David Appell at 5/25/2008 04:47:00 PM

1 comment:

MT said...

Aren't "stratosphere" and "ionosphere" conventions and defined by altitude and by average rather than actual or real time pressure/molecules per cc? That could explain the easy precision.

1:55 PM

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