Between the air we breathe and the vastness of space lies one of the least understood parts of our planet’s atmosphere — the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT). This region, roughly 50 to 120 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, might seem remote, but it plays a crucial role in shaping the environment that satellites, astronauts, and communication systems rely on.
ISSI International Team #571, co-led by Dr. Jorge L. Chau from the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany and Prof. Dr. Huixin Liu from Kyushu University, Japan, set out to unravel how this “gateway to space” behaves — and why it changes so much from one day to the next, especially at low latitudes near the equator.
