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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. 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.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.
 

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4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
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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.


A sunflower crater on Mars

Overview map

A sunflower crater on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “pedestal crater,” a crater that, because the impact smashed the ground to make it more resistent, when the surrounding terrain eroded away it left the crater sitting high and dry.

In this case the crater is only a few feet higher than that surrounding terrain. In fact, though it looks much deeper than the crater to the northeast, both are so shallow that their depth is below the resolution of MRO’s elevation data.

Both craters however suggest the presence of a lot of near surface ice, which is confirmed by overview map above. The rectangle marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, as almost every high resolution picture suggests glacial features and near-surface ice. The crater to the northeast appears filled with glacier debris, while the sunflower-shaped apron around the pedestal crater suggests the impact hit soft ice that splashed away and then hardened.

Though this pedestal crater does not appear to sit high above the plain, the rough edges of its apron illustrate the subsequent erosion. The impact likely stripped away the dust/debris layer that protected the glacial and near-surface ice of that splash apron so that sunlight would cause it to sublimate away. Thus we have that knobby surface at the edges.

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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