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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone that so generously donated. You don’t have to give anything to read my work, and yet so many of you donate or subscribe. I can’t express what that support means to me.

 

For those who still wish to support my work, please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five 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.

 

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Behind The Black
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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.


The lunar surface is arid

The uncertainty of science: According to a paper published at the end of October, scientists have used data from the LADEE lunar orbiter (that circled the Moon in 2013-2014) and found that the surface of the Moon is extremely arid, and if there is any ice trapped in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles it did not come from meteorite impacts elsewhere on the Moon. From the abstract:

The upper bound for exospheric water derived here from data collected in 2013–2014 by the neutral mass spectrometer on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft [LADEE], about three molecules/cc, pales in comparison to the concentration of ∼15,000 molecules/cc needed to sequester the meteoritic water influx. The only pragmatic conclusion is that the hypothesis for water ice accumulation at the poles due to exospheric transport is false.

The theory had been that any water from these meteorites could have been transported by various processes to the polar cold traps. This data says that did not happen, and if there is water ice in the polar cold traps, its origin remains unknown, though comet impacts at the poles might have been a source.

This result also appears to contradict other orbital data that has suggested there is some water in the lunar regolith at mid and low latitudes.

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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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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