It turns out, though, that an atmosphere blocks the tube's reception, so it can't operate on the surface of any inhabited world.
Moreover, the Earth's thick atmosphere blocks X-rays from ever reaching the ground.
The earth's atmosphere essentially blocks gamma rays and X-rays, so observations must be made above the atmosphere.
She was not used to so many days in sunlight, and Hyperion's atmosphere blocked little of the ultraviolet.
The hitch for astronomers hoping to study the recent evolution of stars and galaxies is that the atmosphere blocks ultraviolet rays from reaching Earth.
That's uncommon; the atmosphere blocks most of those.
The ship was still high enough that the atmosphere blocked the dangerous actinics, so the goggle filters didn't deploy.
Those parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the atmosphere did not block were now opened up to astronomy, allowing more discoveries to be made.
X-ray observations cannot be performed from ground-based telescopes, since Earth's atmosphere blocks most of the incoming radiation.
The Venusian atmosphere blocks the escape of infrared radiation.