Iron Man 3: Who Are Avengers In The Atmosphere?

After hinting yesterday that Robert Downey Jr. would drop "a cryptic clue about an Avenger cameo in Iron Man 3," Entertainment Weekly has posted the second part of their five part Robert Downey Jr. interview. However, it's not quite clear what that exact cryptic clue might have been. For the most part, Robert Downey Jr. seems to echo the words of Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige in suggesting that Iron Man 3 will be a solo movie for Tony Stark. When asked about other Avengers in Iron Man 3, Robert Downey Jr. said, "The whole Avengers thing [with $1.5 billion in global box office was such a relief and such a confirmation of [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige's vision for this all along. As Kevin has put it, the next step after that is to bring in someone like Shane Black and – without pretending that the Avengers don't exist – find a way to go back to a kind of re-investigation of Tony's world, which he thought would be, one, fun for the audience and, two, would rock in a different way than The Avengers. But we can't help it — everywhere you look now in every Marvel movie there are opportunities where certain new pals of his could be useful. So they're in the atmosphere, so to speak, but I wouldn't expect to see them on the ground in this one." So what does Avengers in the atmosphere mean? Does it mean that we'll see the introduction of a "new pal" like The Wasp or the Vision? Or does it mean certain Avengers will be felt but not seen, as like in the case of The Mandarin's mysterious Captain America tattoo? Or does it quite literally mean that we might see Thor flying around in the atmosphere, but don't expect him to land on the ground? The only suggestion that EW provides is that they note, "In fact, there's a lot of chatter that Marvel may send Stark back to the far ends of the cosmos as a cast member in the 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy." Of course, Comicbook.com heard this chatter as well, and we first reported on the possibility of Iron Man being in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie back in November of last year as coming from an unconfirmed source. At the time, it was widely derided as something that was just not going to happen, but one Iron Man 3 deep space suit later and it seems others are starting to hear the chatter as well. Could Avengers in the atmosphere be a cryptic clue for Guardians of the Galaxy?