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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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More near Earth objects found by WISE

NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) has released its third year of survey data, including the discovery of 97 previously unknown objects.

Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013.

For reasons that baffle me, NASA added “Near-Earth Object” to the telescope’s name when they restarted the mission, making its official name now NEOWISE.

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

4 comments

  • LocalFluff

    NEOWISE is the recommission of the primary WISE mission, after its cooling hydrogen gas ran out and made its infrared mirror insensitive to the cosmological objects it was originally made to hunt. It lost its original abilities, according to plan, but can still do something, it is a rare space telescope after all. It’s like Kepler and K2, they improvise (informally foresaw from the beginning, I bet) a secondary mission when the primary ran out of gas. NEOWISE is too warm to find much else than near Earth asteroids. So that’s what it does nowadays. That’s what it can do.

  • wayne

    I thought Neo, is the One?
    (Matrix clip)
    https://youtu.be/zYwdzYC3uUc?t=25

  • LocalFluff

    ayne,
    Yeah, just deny reality, and anything will become true for YOU!
    (The liberal leftist assumption)
    MATRIX is communist propaganda.

  • LocalFluff

    The video clip on this link shows asteroids or comets whatever that happen to cross Kepler’s field of view. Ignore the flashes that are just cosmic radiation noise, and the stationary sources that are just background stars. The big one is Neptune and the dot following it is its moon Triton. But everything that moves moderately across the field is an asteroid, or “an object”.

    https://phys.org/news/2016-10-kepler-caught-hundreds-asteroids.html

    AFAIK none of those Kepler observed could have their orbit determined. They were all considered noise. Too narrow field of view to locate any of them. But WISE is wide field and can follow them during long enough time to fix their orbits.

    200 years ago an astronomer went out to the balcony of his Paris flat to have a look at the sky between his cocktail parties (being an astronomer was still a very nice hobby lifestyle choice back then). He there discovered almost half of the asteroids known at the time. Now space telescopes are wasting such observations by the millions! The “big data” problem.

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