Attack of the Ions! Understanding Hydrogen Embrittlement, Orbital Oxidation and Lattice Fusion

We tend to think that once a spacecraft is in orbit it is out of Earth’s atmosphere…this is not strictly true
The atmosphere of the Earth extends farther out than most people realize. Surprisingly, an extension of our atmosphere is found to have caused oxidation of the Moon. The Moon is 382,900 kilometers from the Earth on average with the farthest distance or apogee this year at 406,692 km and its closest or perigee 2 weeks later at 356,907km. The atmosphere of the Earth seems to be a thick shield that protects our planet from cosmic and solar radiation and most meteors. But wait a minute. The average radius of the Earth is 6,371km. Space is considered to start just 100km above the surface. To get an idea about how thin that really is go get an average size bowling ball and breath on it so the surface fogs. The thickness of that moisture on the bowling ball is the relative thickness of our atmosphere. This is like taking a beach ball and laying a sheet of paper on top. We don’t often think of the atmosphere this way. We depend on it to stop our spacecraft, but above 30km we have left behind 99% of the atmosphere, and at 100km the atmosphere becomes so thin that we have left 99.9999% of it behind. How can what is left have any effect on our spacecraft? The atmosphere of Earth is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, a little less than 1% argon and 0.0410% CO2 and rising. It was 0.314% in 1976. That may not sound like a lot but as CO2 retains heat it has a noticeable effect. As the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere rises with climate change, we can expect all our numbers to have shifted a little, higher temperatures, lower pressure, and density.

The atmosphere starts with the troposphere which starts at the surface of the planet and extends up to about 15 km at most, quite often less depending on the temperature and sun activity.
Since the tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest at 8,848 meters, so only halfway through the troposphere. The stratosphere starts at 15km and extends to about 50km. So, remember 15-50… next comes the mesosphere which extends to 85 km. Most meteors burn up in the mesosphere. The next layer is the thermosphere which extends all the way out to 600km, but let’s think about that. At what altitude does the international space station orbit? Very close to 400km. That means the station is well within the thermosphere. The next layer is the ionosphere which is a layer of electrons, atoms and molecules that overlaps some of the mesosphere and thermosphere, stretching from about 45 km above the surface to about 365km. The size of the ionosphere grows and shrinks based on the sun’s activity. The ionosphere is divided into subregions, D, E and F, based on the wavelength of solar radiation absorbed by that layer. We’ll come back to this. Finally, we have the Exosphere. The exosphere extends from the top of the thermosphere out to 10,000km. But the Moon is much further away at over 400,000km. How does oxygen from the Earth reach the Moon? Remember that the atmosphere of a planet is constantly losing some atmosphere as it is stripped away by the solar winds. This is how Venus lost a lot of the hydrogen that had been in its water and why Earth doesn’t keep helium or hydrogen gas. The solar winds strip away a little of Earth’s atmosphere and it streams away into space. This forms a comet like tail of streaming atmosphere from the Earth constantly pointing away from the Sun. When the Moon moves through this tail of atmosphere oxygen, nitrogen and other elements can impact the surface, oxidizing some of the iron on the Moon and embedding these chemicals into the lunar regolith. These can be extracted by heating the regolith and capturing the volatile gases released. In fact, the Moon has a very slight atmosphere from these volatiles being released by sunlight then falling back during darklune.
Now let’s look back at the international space station. The ISS orbit varies just a little with a minimum perigee of 400km and a maximum apogee of 420km with an orbital inclination of 51 degrees and an orbital velocity of 27,600kph which is 7.66km/s...

Sources
https://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/structur.htm

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/atmosphere-layers2.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0032063382901337

https://heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544

http://www.braeunig.us/space/atmos.htm

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3590335

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925838819347942

https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2016/acs-presspac-november-9-2016/what-the-cold-fusion-debacle-has-revealed-.html

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