Kármán line
- July 14, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Kármán line
Subject: Science and Technology
Context: British businessman Richard Branson beat rival Jeff Bezos to reach the edge of space, giving space tourism an official kickstart. But experts and space enthusiasts are in doubt whether the height to which he travelled can be termed ‘space’.
Concept:
- The most widely accepted boundary of space is known as the Kármán line, 100km above mean sea level. The Kármán line has been compared to international waters, as there are no national boundaries and human laws in force beyond the line. It was named after aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kármán, who wrote that this is certainly a physical boundary, where aerodynamics stops and astronautics begin. Below this line, space belongs to each country. Above this level, there would be free space.
- The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that space should be accessible to all countries and can be freely and scientifically investigated.
- Defining a legal boundary of what and where space is can help avoid disputes and keep track of space activities and human space travel.
- The United States, believe that defining or delimiting outer space is not necessary.
- It has been tricky understanding where our atmosphere ends and what should be called space.
- the Kármán line or “boundary was chosen as a nice round figure”, but it needs more studies from “a physical point of view”.
Layers of the atmosphere
- The Earth’s atmosphere has been divided into various layers, with the troposphere starting at the Earth’s surface and extending about 14.5 km high, stratosphere extending to 50 km, mesosphere to 85 km, and thermosphere to 600 kilometers and exosphere to 10,000 km.
- The chemical composition of the atmosphere was largely constant up to the mesopause, or the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere.