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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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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.


Exploring the cratered southern highlands of Mars, part 3

Overview map

Pit and surface in crater
Click for original image.

This is the third part of this week’s series taking a look at some of the strange features in the southern cratered highlands of Mars. In the first part I posted a beautiful image of what appears to be a crater filled to the brim with glacial ice, surrounded by an ice sheet plain. In part two we took a look at the interior of Rabe Crater, which though very nearby does not appear to have obvious glacial features within it at all. What it has instead are deep open air pits and a lot of sand dunes.

Today’s image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, takes us to the interior of an unnamed 45-mile-wide crater only about 70 miles north of Rabe. The black dot in the inset on overview map above indicates the photo’s location. The picture was taken on January 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like Rabe, this crater also has many large open-air pits. In the picture one pit, near the lower center of the picture, is surrounded by soft-looking mounds and a strangely swirling textured and uneven terrain that makes up the majority of the crater’s floor.

This picture might help explain what we saw in Rabe. The textured terrain in this unnamed crater could easily be ice-impregnated and now hardened sand dunes. The pit could be where that impregnated ice has sublimated away, leaving behind the dust from those ancient dunes which then forms new sand dunes. In Rabe, the crater floor above its pits looks very similar to this swirling textured surface, suggesting the same process is going on there.

What strengthens this explanation is the many other craters nearby, all indicated by red dots in the overview map above, that also have pits or distorted crater floors. Their proximity suggests that there is an underground ice layer in this region, always at about the same elevation, and each crater impact exposed it. With time that exposed ice, no longer pure but filled with material from the impacts, sublimated partly away, producing the pits as well as ample sand to form sand dunes.

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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