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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:

 

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Dry barren ground in Martian northern lowlands?

Dry barren ground in the Martian northern lowlands?
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image is intriguing because of what appears to not be there, rather than what is there. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 3, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

At first glance it appears to show a very dry, barren surface. At its base are many parallel grooves running from the southwest to the northeast. On top of these grooves are several more recent crater impacts, as well as several patches of higher bedrock that appears to have been hard enough to resist whatever erosion process caused the groves.

Yet, based on the overview map below, the location of this photo should not be dry and barren, but instead home to a near-surface ice sheet covering everything.

Overview map

The red cross marks the location of today’s picture, practically in the center of Utopia Basin, Mars’ largest deep impact basin. The location is also at 37 degrees north latitude, in the mid-latitudes where scientists have found ample evidence of near-surface ice, either as glaciers inside craters or flowing down hollows and mesa walls, or as vast ice sheets that cause craters to warp and deform when formed.

At this location however there does not appear to be any evidence of near-surface ice. Instead, the parallel striations suggest that once a glacier flowed here, with the grooves suggesting the direction of flow as its base scratched the bedrock on which it sat, and which now is exposed and completely visible. The patches are places more resistant to that glacial ice flow, and was thus not eroded as the ice moved over it.

Yet, why is this spot so dry, compared to so much of the mid-latitudes where evidence of ice is so frequently found? Maybe past images gave a wrong impression. Maybe they were evidence of confirmation bias on my part, where because scientists are interested in the ice in the mid-latitudes their MRO images tended to favor locations where that ice is found, and thus gave me the incorrect impression that ice covered most of the mid-latitudes. Instead, maybe there is a lot of barren spots in the mid-latitudes, like this one.

Or maybe this barren spot is the exception that proves the rule. Or maybe it isn’t as barren as it appears at first glance, and there is buried ice here, though not obvious.

Your guess is as good as mine. Because at this moment much of what we are doing is guessing, based on the limited information available.

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

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