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Readers!

 

The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

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Navigating a rover on Mars

16 photos taken by Perseverance's right navigation camera on May 2, 2022

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo to the right is actually a screen capture of 16 consecutive photos taken on May 2, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance.

The overview map below gives the context. The red dot marks Perseverance’s position when the photos were taken. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s position. The small white dot marks the spot where the rover’s parachute landed. The yellow lines indicate I think the area covered by the sixteen navigation images.

There is a reason for showing this panorama in this somewhat crude form. The engineers who run Perseverance have programmed its navigation cameras to send back its pictures so that they immediately line up in this coherent pattern. There is no need to rearrange them upon arrival. The engineers thus can instantly see how each picture relates to the others, and thus get an immediate sense of the nearby terrain in which they must plot the rover’s next move.

Perseverance is now in its second science campaign, focused on studying the base of the delta. As the science team studies the delta’s cliff face, they are also studying the best route to continue uphill. To do both, they have begun slowly moving along that face, going from west to east.

The rough panorama above thus shows them the ground ahead as they continue that traverse. I expect the rover’s next move will be to the northeast, once again moving along the base of the nearest cliff. The panorama shows that while the ground in this area has a few ridges, none are so high as to cause Perseverance any problems.

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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

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