But the startling images from Polar serve to confirm the existence of atmospheric holes and completely eliminate the possibility of instrumental artifacts.

In the Polar images the atmospheric holes appear as clusters of pixels, or picture elements, rather than as single pixels as in the Dynamics Explorer images, which had much less spatial resolution. The atmospheric holes are measured to be 25-to-50 miles across. The Earth camera on Polar detects these atmospheric holes at a rate that suggests Earth is being bombarded by 5-to-30 small comets per minute, approximately the same frequency recorded by the Dynamics Explorer imager.

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