How to Use the Planet Atmosphere Scale Heights 3D Explorer - Step by Step
Open the Planet Atmosphere Scale Heights 3D Explorer, drag the altitude slider, and read the facts panel to see how much of each world's own surface pressure survives at that height.
Drag the altitude slider
Drag the altitude slider from 0 to 90 km. A shared white probe plane moves across all five columns - Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan - at once, and the facts panel recomputes for every world live.
Watch the columns fade
Watch each column's stacked bands fade as the probe rises. The fade follows that world's own real barometric formula, pressure over surface pressure equals e to the power of minus altitude over scale height - a genuine physics relationship, not an arbitrary visual effect.
Read the pressure-remaining table
Read the facts panel table for the live percentage of surface (or 1-bar) pressure remaining at the current altitude, for all five worlds side by side.
Compare the five worlds by color
Compare the five worlds by color: Venus is orange-gold, Earth is blue, Mars is rust, Jupiter is tan, and Titan is hazy-gold. Each ground-marker disk repeats its world's color, and the facts-panel table repeats the same swatch next to the world's name.
Note the Titan range and the Jupiter marker
Note two disclosures in the facts panel: Titan's scale height is shown as a range of roughly 15 to 50 km rather than one settled figure, and Jupiter's "0 km" ground marker is the standard 1-bar reference level used for gas giants, not a solid surface.
Read the H = kT / (Mg) explainer
Read the H = kT / (Mg) explainer in the facts panel: a hot, light-molecule, low-gravity atmosphere gets a large scale height, and a cold, heavy-molecule, high-gravity one gets a small one - which is why Jupiter and Titan both end up with larger scale heights than Earth despite being colder.
Next: see when to use this explorer or how it compares to the Karman Line & Atmosphere Layers 3D Explorer.
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