Actually the choice of that wording was determined by the folks helping us with the press conference at AGU. Most folks don't even know what an ionosphere is, so we had to go with something that would at least give the average reader (not the Slashdot reader) a concept to start with. The BBC article did a good job of explaining the science and the concepts once you get past the headline.

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of "where space begins." What we were reporting is that the "transition height" or "topside" in the ionosphere, the altitude where the density of O+ and the density of the light ions (H+ and He+) are equal, is lower than we have ever seen before. Here's a link for the definitions of these layers:

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/IONO/ionostru.html

Note that above this level we don't have much interference with radio communications, so the practical interest is with the ionosphere below this altitude. Also this site points out that the topside rarely is below 500 km on the nightside, but the C/NOFS results show that it's currently almost always below that height (down to 400 km in places) .

Here's a link to the press release that went with this press conference that gives a bit more information and a nice graphic of the topside measured by the CINDI instrument on C/NOFS.

http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2008/12/16-001.html

(Full disclosure: I am a member of the CINDI-C/NOFS project.)

As one of the co-creators of "Cindi in Space" I want to thank slashdot for mentioning us, and to answer a few of the questions here.

Is it "manga" or not? From a purist standpoint it's not "manga" since it's not drawn or written by anyone who is Japanese. OTOH we did deliberately ask Erik Lervold (our artist from MCAD whom I met at MCAD's Schoolgirls and Mobilesuit anime/manga workshops) to make the artwork manga-like and he came up with something that's halfway between US style and Japanese style. So you can call it "manga," you can call it a "comic book," or you can call it a "graphical introduction for middle school students to the CINDI mission" (which is what we call it in our reports to NASA).

As for the various complaints about why we didn't just give the straight science, remember the target audience is typical sixth through ninth graders. If we just did straight science we'd lose 98% of them on the first page. There is already enough boring and bad science education material out there. Yes, the story is silly, but the idea is to get the reader interested and let the science sneak up on them instead of hitting them over the head with it straight off. "The Magic Schoolbus" (books and TV series) was our ideal role model of how to do that right and make it work.

BTW, we're not the first science comic book. There are all the wonderful comics by Larry Gonick. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/ref=s_sf_b_as/103-8242802-9062263 Then there was a comic book done by Zander Cannon (and Kevin Cannon) called "Space Weather" put out by NOAA back in 2001. http://www.kevincannon.org/published/ And there are two manga (real manga in Japanese!) about the aurora and the Earth's magnetic field put out by the Solar-Terrestrial Environmental Laboratory at Nagoya University. NOAA helped create English translations of them here: http://www.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ste-www1/doce/out reach.html#anc_booklets STEL has a lot more science manga in Japanese here: http://www.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ste-www1/doc/outr each_j.html All of these were the inspirations for us to do our own comic book. Also there was a great NPR story last spring about using comic books in science education at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4581832 One of the books mentioned there was "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards" which is a comic book/graphic novel about the bitter fight between the nineteenth century paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh. I just picked up a copy last week at my local comic book store and it's great! Two of the artists are none other than Zander and Kevin Cannon from above.

For SynapseLapse (644398) who suggested watching "PlanetES": Yeah!! I second that. One of the two NASA space junk experts interviewed in the US release (Dr. Mark Matney) is a grad school buddy of mine and didn't tell Bandai he'd already seen some fansubs of the series before they approached him to do the interviews. (I wonder how that happened....) BTW, NOAA has commissioned Zander and Kevin Cannon to do a sequel to their "Space Weather" comic about "Space Junk." http://www.bigtimeattic.com/blog/2005_09_01_archiv e.html

For Peterus7 (607982) who wrote: "Well, you see, a secret pact between Nerv and the State Alchemists used a special alloy called spacedogium to help create a weapon using ancient space energy to fight off Shonen Bat. Eventually it went spacebound, and the process created Space dogs. And now Johan Leibert is the head of the android dog catching squad, and will slowly take over the multiverse. Throw in a tenticle monster from the schema world and we're set."
Dang, you guessed our next project. Can I put you down as a suggested referee when we submit our proposal to NASA?

For ehiris (214677) who wanted nudity and hentai in the manga: Seriously, this is NASA you're talking about. Dream on...

For Sean Riordan (611520) who mentioned the delays in launching the satellite: Yeah, it's more than two years overdue, but that's not unusual in the space science business and you learn to live with it (and it gave us the extra time to do the comic). Right now the launch is set for February 2006 and we're optimistic that it will be in orbit by the end of spring.

And for pikine (771084) who noticed that the neutral atom on page 15 should have been an ion: Thanks for spotting that. It's embarrassing to think how many folks (scientists and teachers) had read this already and missed that. I'll get Erik to fix it and we'll have revised version on-line ASAP.

Thank you all for reading the comic. Even those of you who didn't like it. ^_^
Dr. Marc Hairston
W. B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences
University of Texas at Dallas
hairston at utdallas.edu