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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter comes out of safe mode

On February 23 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) engineering team was able to bring the spacecraft out of safe mode, after a low battery voltage reading caused it to shut down.

Mission team members brought MRO out of safe mode on Friday (Feb. 23), NASA officials said. The orbiter seems to be in good health overall; the battery voltage is back to normal, MRO is communicating with Earth, and temperatures and power levels are stable, agency officials said.

But MRO’s handlers haven’t put the orbiter back to work yet. “We’re in the diagnostic stage, to better understand the behavior of the batteries and ways to give ourselves more options for managing them in the future,” MRO project manager Dan Johnston, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “We will restore MRO’s service as a relay for other missions as soon as we can do so with confidence in spacecraft safety — likely in about one week. After that, we will resume science observations.”

Overall this sounds like very good news.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • Kirk

    MRO has one of the two penetrating radars in orbit around Mars, the other being on Mars Express. Bob, do you know if either have imaged Valles Marineris and if they would have the ability to detect the huge amounts of ice claimed to be there in this 2013 Geomorphology paper? One million cubic kilometers of fossil ice in Valles Marineris: Relicts of a 3.5 Gy old
    glacial landsystem along the Martian equator — http://www.dmzone.org/papers/Gourroncetal2014_VM.pdf

  • Kirk: I don’t have a direct answer to your question. Recently however I read this paper, Geomorphological Evidence for Shallow Ice in the Southern Hemisphere of Mars, which suggested to me that the Mars planetary community has accepted the existence of what they call an “ice table” on Mars, vs a water table here on Earth. They think it disappears in the lower latitudes, and the paper was an effort to map its closest position to the equator.

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JE005366/abstract

  • Kirk

    Thanks for that link Bob.

    The 2013 Geomorphology paper seems almost too good to be true, so it’s strange that I can’t find any critique — positive or negative — of it. Anyone interested in the question of water on Mars should give it a look. The researchers claim that Valles Marineris, a rift valley, shows extensive signs of glaciation in the past, and that once the period of active glaciation was over, a huge amount of fossil ice was left behind covered in debris — both wind blown and ablation till. The shape of the ablation till along the sides of the canyons suggests that 0.3 million km^3 of that ice has sublimated, but that up to 1.0 million km^3 remain. That’s as much ice as is in a Martian polar cap, or 40% that of the Greenland ice sheet, or the equivalent water of ten times all the fresh water in rivers and lakes on Earth. That is a huge amount of ice to be so near the equator.

    I recently asked Pascal Lee (planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, chairman of the Mars Institute, and director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames) about it, and while he had not heard of the paper before, he said he wasn’t at all surprised because “there is a lot of water ice on Mars.” He also pointed out that his contribution to NASA’s 50 candidate landing spots for the first human Mars expedition is in Valles Marineris.

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