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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.

 

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Scientists make guess about origins of Pluto’s nitrogen sea

Garbage in, garbage out: Scientists have written a computer model that supposedly tells them how Pluto’s thick heart-shaped glacier packed ocean of nitrogen and carbon monoxide formed.

[T]o find out how the glaciers formed in the first place, scientists created models that simulated atmospheric circulation on the dwarf planet for the last 50,000 years (a mere 200 orbits around the sun for Pluto). At the beginning of the simulations, the researchers gave Pluto a planet-wide veneer of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices a few millimeters thick; then, the planet’s surface and atmosphere evolved as the icy orb passed through orbit after orbit. If Pluto were a completely smooth sphere, it would have either a permanent swath of nitrogen ice at the equator or seasonal snow caps at its poles. But that’s not what the planet looks like today. When researchers added realistic topography to the model, including the 4-kilometer-deep Sputnik Planum and two other large craters, the basin gradually trapped Pluto’s nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and much of its methane, the researchers report online today in Nature.

While the computer model here can help planetary scientists better understand how Pluto might have evolved, to use it to draw any conclusions about Pluto’s geological history is absurd. Scientist have no idea what Pluto was like 50,000 years ago. Heck, we don’t even know what half the planet looks like now.

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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