Ever wonder how high the atmosphere actually goes? Well, there’s a bit of a debate. Many organizations around the world have declared that an imaginary boundary called the Kármán Line is where space begins, and it’s 100km/62 miles up. At the same time, we were taught in school that the uppermost layer of the atmosphere (the exosphere) technically ends 10,000 km/6,200 miles up.

To muddy the waters even more, the Russian Space Research Institute published a paper in 2019, that looked at the data from an observatory spacecraft that NASA and the ESA launched 20 years ago. They found, based on 2 decades of data, that our atmosphere might even extend farther than that; close to 630,000km/391,460 miles from us.

In comparison, the moon is only 384,000km/238,600 miles away, so based on that research, the moon is situated well in the middle of our atmosphere. Mind=blown.