DART really clocked that asteroid, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Bam! NASA Says DART Really Clocked That Asteroid!
Yes, climate change surely poses the biggest existential threat to humanity right now, but when one day an asteroid or comet comes barreling toward Earth, I want our space agencies ready to handle it. On September 26, NASA and its partners successfully crashed the DART spacecraft into a small asteroid, and then the team confirmed this week that the impact indeed altered the space rock’s trajectory.
SOFIA, the Historic Airplane-Borne Telescope, Lands for the Last Time
At the same time, another NASA mission has just come to an end. SOFIA, the innovative infrared telescope installed on a Boeing 747 (since you can’t probe those wavelengths from the ground) just flew its last flight. This was my most popular WIRED story over the past month.
The FCC’s Rules on Space Junk Just Got Stricter
Most rules for spacecraft today require people to ensure their defunct satellites come down within a quarter century and burn up in the atmosphere, to lessen the pollution clogging low Earth orbit. But many don’t comply, and the FCC argues, 25 years is too long. So they’re instituting a 5-year rule. It seems technical, but it could make an impact on a problem resembling the growing plastic waste in the oceans.
These Sci-Fi Visions for Interstellar Travel Just Might Work
While very few of Earthlings’ space expeditions have ever gone beyond low Earth orbit, Les Johnson dreams of traveling much farther from home. The NASA scientist and book author envisions the future of solar sails, continuous fusion, and antimatter drives that could propel spacecraft of the future to other stars. Check out my fascinating interview with him in this piece.
In other writing…
The sky needs its ‘Silent Spring’ moment
I remember living in Tucson, Arizona, a desert town surrounded by observatories and national parks. While the place strictly regulates light pollution, most cities don’t, and now all that light is threatening to take away the night sky for us humans and for wildlife as well. In Scientific American, Josh Sokol makes the case for expanding our efforts to save the sky.
The search for intelligent life is about to get a lot more interesting
It’s one thing to hunt for signs of alien lifeforms, like water vapor and oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere, but how do we search for advanced civilizations, the kinds of aliens we could communicate with? This New York Times piece by Jon Gertner describes efforts to spot “technosignatures,” things like electromagnetic signals, reflective materials and atmospheric pollution, on faraway worlds.
Rocketland
SpaceX is expanding its spaceport and Starship testing site in the middle of nowhere in southern Texas, and many fans of the company have flocked there to witness the new activity. While I’ve been critical of Elon Musk, I think this is an interesting story, written by space reporter Loren Grush in The Verge.
A conversation with Svetlana Alexievich
Alexievich, the Nobel prize-winning journalist and author of the book Voices from Chernobyl chronicled the disturbing stories of people who suffered through the fallout of that infamous nuclear disaster. This new interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books puts those stories in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Satire lives!
And now for something completely different. I recommend reading The Onion’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court, defending parodists’ First Amendment rights.
What I’m reading: The Stanisław Lem collection, The Truth and Other Stories.
Looking back: Six years ago, I wrote this piece in Nature magazine about the science of polling. With the US Congressional elections coming up, we’ll soon see how well pollsters’ latest projections hold up.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and I’ve just moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. I used to be a freelance writer and journalist, and before that, an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.