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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.

 

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A fine collection of Rosetta images

Comet 67P/C-G

Many cool images! The Rosetta team has released a bunch of very nice images taken of Comet 67P/C-G during August when the spacecraft was flying in close. The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to post here, shows the comet’s large lobe, with the narrow neck to the left. Make sure you check out the full resolution image. It was taken on August 10, 2016 from about 8 miles away, and has a resolution of less than four feet per pixel. If a person was standing there you could just see them!

What I find most fascinating is the incredible curvature of the comet’s surface. The smooth area on the left, dubbed Imhotep (images of which have been posted here previously), has several big boulders on its flat surface. If you stood there, the ground would be down and horizontal. Walk only a short distance and you quickly reach the curving horizon and that flat area would look like a steep slope dropping down behind you. Yet, the boulders do not roll down hill! Walk a short distance more and you begin to enter the neck region, with giant walls rising above you, until you start to walk up them and they become the floor!

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

5 comments

  • Dick Eagleson

    Make a heck of a walking tour if there was any gravity to speak of.

  • Localfluff

    Petit Prince’s world exists for real!
    If it had substantial gravity, as if it was made out of solid gold, one would still land softly on the side of the cliff one fell off from. The wall would be the new ground to stand on. I hope I live to see astronauts hoover at the moons of Mars. Milligravity will be a new experience. The universe is a weird place.

  • wayne

    correct me if I’m mistaken– Wikipedia has the escape-velocity listed as “roughly 1 meter/sec.”
    You could practically jump off this Comet– is that a fair statement? (I’m thinking the trouble they had actually landing the lander, without it bouncing off into space.)

  • Localfluff

    Wayne,
    Yes you could easily jump off it. Off of that P69 comet.
    From Deimos and Phobos you will need some kind of gadget to get you into (a lasting) orbit. Like a bicycle. Or a pole jumping stick.

  • Localfluff

    A recent von Karman presentation about Rosetta, not archived yet but surely some day this week.
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures_archive.php?year=2016&month=8

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