Atmosphere of Earth and balloons, and too low to permit orbital spacecraft. The mesosphere is mainly accessed by sounding rockets and rocket-powered aircraft. The stratosphere is the second-lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. It lies above the troposphere and is separated from it by the tropopause. This layer extends from the top of the troposphere at roughly above Earth's surface to the stratopause at an altitude of about . The atmospheric pressure at the top of the stratosphere is roughly 1/1000 the pressure at sea level. It contains the ozone layer, which is the part of Earth's atmosphere that contains relatively high concentrations of
Sodium layer compensate for movements in the atmosphere. As a result, optical telescopes can perform much closer to their theoretical limit of resolution. The sodium layer was first discovered in 1929 by American astronomer Vesto Slipher. In 1939 the British-American geophysicist Sydney Chapman proposed a reaction-cycle theory to explain the night-glow phenomenon. Sodium layer The sodium layer is a layer of neutral atoms of sodium within Earth's mesosphere. This layer usually lies within an altitude range of above sea level and has a depth of about . The sodium comes from the ablation of meteors. Atmospheric sodium below this layer is normally