Engineers Squeeze More Power Out of the Aging Voyager Spacecraft, 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.
As someone born the same year as the Voyager spacecraft got off the ground, I feel like I have a special connection to the two of them—and to the Golden Records, the brilliant concept of sending a hopeful message that’s both from and for humanity. As long as the Voyagers keep going, I’ll keep writing about them. Hope you enjoy this and other stories I’ve shared below.
Voyager 2 Gets a Life-Extending Power Boost in Deep Space
The pair of iconic interplanetary—now interstellar—Voyager probes are still going strong! I had fun interviewing engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for this, as they implement a power-saving strategy to keep the spacecraft running and collecting data, which they could continue to do past their 50th birthdays in 2027. This was my most popular WIRED story this month by far.
Is Cosmology Broken? This Map May Be a Crucial Puzzle Piece
A team of astronomers with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope have now mapped the cosmos across a huge swath of the sky and spanning billions of years. And that achievement bears on two persistent puzzles: nobody agrees on how fast the universe is expanding (as I’ve written before), and scientists can’t resolve exactly how fast clumps of dark matter and galaxies have become more massive over time.
This Private Moon Lander Is Kicking Off a Commercial Lunar Race
The Japanese company ispace had the chance to deliver the first private lander to the moon’s surface, but sadly the spacecraft didn’t seem to survive the landing, and its payloads, including two rovers, are probably lost. But more commercial landers will come later this year. This is just the beginning.
In other writing…
Voice and hammer
We lost Harry Belafonte, an immensely influential musician and activist, at the age of 96. I like this 2013 feature by Jeff Sharlet in VQR, who brings his personality to life. I’ve always loved his music, including the songs he performed on The Muppet Show,
and it’s also important to honor his advocacy for civil rights and justice worldwide.
A heat shield for the most important ice on Earth
Every year we’re losing Arctic ice, a victim of the climate crisis and a cause of new global problems of its own. People are considering a geoengineering scheme that involves spreading tiny glass bubbles in a delicate ecosystem, which might have unforeseen consequences. I like this New Yorker piece by Rachel Riederer as well as others in their climate solutions series by Meera Subramanian and David W. Brown.
Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes
The US and Russia have already been incorporating AI in parts of their nuclear systems, and Ross Andersen writes eloquently in The Atlantic about the grave risks of that. There have already been false alarms that nearly led to disaster, and both countries have *hundreds* of nukes on “hair-trigger alert.” If you’re concerned about AI in military drones—sometimes criticized as “killer robots”—then you should worry about this, too.
Saving the monarch butterfly migration
I think we can all appreciate the vulnerable beauty of butterflies, and especially monarchs. It feels like a blessing when one flits into view. I loved this feature by Romina Cenisio in Atmos magazine, describing conservation efforts after the butterfly was listed as endangered. I also liked Ben Goldfarb’s High Country News story about efforts to save the Behren’s silverspot butterfly.
Extinction coalition
The climate group Extinction Rebellion came on the scene just a couple years ago and became controversial for its disruptive tactics (such as activists gluing themselves to a Picasso painting). Jon Allsop’s interesting New York Review of Books essay chronicles their evolution into a more mainstream organization, like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. I also liked David Quammen’s new NYRB essay, titled “What is Wildness?”
What I’m reading: Trust, the novel by Hernan Diaz, which just won a Pulitzer.
Looking back: Four years ago I wrote this opinion essay in Undark magazine about the Trump administration’s moon policy, allowing private ownership of space resources and encouraging space mining. That was a precursor to the Artemis Accords, which have effectively become the law of the lunar land.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and I’ve recently 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.