Air conditioning eventually reach the upper atmosphere. Once the refrigerant reaches the stratosphere, UV radiation from the Sun homolytically cleaves the chlorine-carbon bond, yielding a chlorine radical. These chlorine radicals catalyze the breakdown of ozone into diatomic oxygen, depleting the ozone layer that shields the Earth's surface from strong UV radiation. Each chlorine radical remains active as a catalyst until it binds with another radical, forming a stable molecule and quenching the chain reaction. Prior to 1994, most automotive air conditioning systems used R-12 as a refrigerant. It was replaced with R-134a refrigerant, which has no ozone depletion potential. Old R-12 systems
Exposing Microorganisms in the Stratosphere stratosphere (31 km above sea level), 99.9% of the entire population was destroyed. According to the researchers, "most terrestrial bacteria would be inactivated within the first [day] on Mars if contaminated spacecraft surfaces receive direct sunlight." Of the 40 million spores exposed to the stratosphere, only 267 spores (or 0.0007%) remained viable. Extrapolating this, no viable spores would remain if flight samples had an additional 150 minutes of Sun exposure in the stratosphere (630 min total time). The survivors showed three single nucleotide (base pair) substitutions compared to unexposed controls kept on the ground. These three coding regions are associated