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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 Martian hill of pillows

Curiosity's future path, taken January 31, 2023
Click for original image.

The cool image above was taken on January 31, 2023 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. The red dotted line indicates roughly the planned route forward for the rover, though as Curiosity gets closer to that hill the terrain is looking increasingly difficult. The white box in the panorama below, taken two weeks earlier when the rover was about five hundred feet away, indicates the area covered by this picture. Since then Curiosity has traveled about 200 feet closer.

I post this picture specifically because of the small hill to the right of that path. Probably no more than fifty feet high, its entire surface appears cloaked by a pile of large, pillow-like pavement stones, almost as if the ground below had been washed away so that the massive top layer fell downward over time. Later, wind erosion over eons smoothed the rough edges of those massive blocks, giving them their cushion-like shapes.

This is strange geology. You might see such strange geology on Earth, but rarely. On Mars however strange geology appears increasingly common.

Moreover, to get a 3D sense of this terrain, load into your browser (on separate tabs) the full images of this hill, taken by Curiosity’s right and left navigation cameras (here and here). If you switch back and forth quickly between those tabs, you will see the slight shift in position between the two cameras, and be able to perceive this hill in three dimensions.

Panorama taken January 17, 2023 by Curiosity

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

2 comments

  • Star Bird

    Any signs of Marvin K-9 and those Instant Martians yet?

  • Greg the Geologist

    Pillow lavas are fairly common on earth, but form when basaltic lava is extruded under water (as on the flanks of a Hawaiian island, or along a mid-ocean ridge). Hmm…

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