In the process, they're washing away the neon that should also be in the upper atmosphere, researchers from UC Berkeley reported Monday in the online version of the journal Physical Review Letters.
At the time, there was some speculation that spray cans and supersonic jets such as Concorde might be damaging the upper atmosphere's ozone layer that protects us from the sun's ultra-violet radiation.
But Yinghuo 1 will also be exploring the upper atmosphere of Mars aiming to discover why water vanished from the red planet.
In the commercial, it makes it look like they're in outer space, but guess what: that's just the upper atmosphere, where the air is too thin to see.
The measures don't reveal exactly how much bromine is in the upper atmosphere, where the ozone layer sits, but they can be used to predict how much of the ozone-destroying chemical will eventually make its way there.
By comparing the numbers of neutrons detected by two different South Pole sensors each tuned to detect neutrons of a different energy Bieber and colleagues found they could estimate how many protons of various energies were striking the upper atmosphere.
Their simulations showed that the only way neon could be removed from the upper atmosphere is to have it fall out with helium, since neon and helium mix easily, like alcohol and water.
It it's far too small, it'll simply be obliterated in the upper atmosphere.
On the other hand, if the contrail is obvious for a time, is long and spreads, the upper atmosphere you're observing is wet.
Light at these wavelengths is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, so observations at these wavelengths must be performed from the upper atmosphere or from space.
