A tiny bit of the air actually escapes into space. Around 90 tonnes of the atmosphere disappears into space every day, according to the European Space Agency. Air is made up of a whole range of different gases, but it consists of as much as 80 percent nitrogen.
Vitally essential oxygen makes up around 20 percent, along with smaller amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen and other substances. But this is where our intuition about the world trips up slightly. We experience rocks as something heavy and tangible, while air is something fundamentally different. The philosophers of antiquity and other parts of the world came up with the four elements earth, fire, air and water as having qualities that are unique and different from each other.
But that's not how the world works. Everything is made up of elements, and these elements have mass and weight. For either a nitrogen molecule or a rock is to rise above Earth's deep gravitational field, energy needs to be supplied. When we send objects into space, we use rockets to counteract gravity. This requires a lot of energy, which explains why the rockets we use are so large and need so much fuel.
To escape Earth's gravity from ground level, you have to ascend at over 40 kilometres per hour. A Saturn V rocket carried a lunar rover, the spacecraft and three astronauts to the moon, with a total maximum weight of tonnes.
But to launch it into space, the entire rocket weighed 2 tonnes — most of which was fuel, according to NASA. A molecule with nitrogen is much lighter than the rocket load, but energy must still be supplied for it to escape. From Earth orbit, we gain a new window into our planet. And suddenly our atmosphere, which seemed so vast and mysterious from the ground, appears shockingly thin, even fragile. Not only does it contain the oxygen we need to live, but it also protects us from harmful ultraviolet solar radiation.
And it warms our planet and keeps temperatures habitable for our living Earth. Further, about 80 percent of the atmosphere is contained within its lowest layer, the troposphere, which is, on average, just 12 kilometers 7. If you drove that distance on the ground, you might see a change in scenery. Is it fragile or robust? Stable or volatile? And how much are humans affecting it, really? In this five-part series, we asked several NASA atmospheric scientists to weigh in on the matter.
TES operated from to early But how did this giant gaseous envelope form? In short, our atmosphere is here because of gravity. When Earth formed, about 4. But as the world cooled, its atmosphere formed, largely from gases spewed out of volcanoes, according to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center SERC.
This ancient atmosphere was very different from today's; it had hydrogen sulfide, methane and 10 to times as much carbon dioxide as the modern atmosphere does, according to SERC. After around 3 billion years, the photosynthetic system evolved, meaning that single-celled organisms used the sun's energy to turn molecules of carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen gas. Actually, the answer to this is interesting.
The actual answer is that the vacuum of space does not exert any force on the atmosphere at all. What will happen? Air will rush into the box and fill it. But why did it do that? Was it because the vacuum sucked the air into the box? The air that fills the box is being pushed by air pressure into the empty space.
What they do is present an empty space and then air pressure forces the air into the vacuum.
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