How to smash an 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.
How Do You Best Smash an Asteroid?
Nearly one year ago, NASA flung the DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour. It was a test to see whether one could deflect a space rock’s trajectory using a high-speed collision. Could this technique actually work to protect Earth from future killer asteroids? And if not, what else could save us? I explored a bunch of “planetary defense” ideas in this new piece.
India Makes History While Russia Falters with Moon Landers
On August 23, India became the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon (after the USSR, US and China), and the first to touch down near the lunar south pole, known to have pockets of valuable water ice. Just days earlier, Russia’s landing attempt failed, another setback for the country’s struggling space program in the wake of its disastrous invasion of Ukraine. And I have some skepticism as well for Indian Prime Minister Modi’s comments about the world uniting behind moon exploration, which contrast with his xenophobic and anti-Muslim policies at home. For more on the geopolitical context, I wrote this just before the landings.
How NASA Nearly Lost the Voyager 2 Spacecraft Forever
So NASA almost lost touch with the iconic and 46-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is continuing to do science in interstellar space. A mistaken signal sent to the probe pointed its antenna away from Earth, making the Voyager team unable to contact it or receive data. This was my most popular story in August.
In other writing…
Barbenheimer
I haven’t seen the Barbie or Oppenheimer movies yet, but I hope to soon, and here are a few interesting perspectives that don’t have many spoilers. I recommend this essay in Orion magazine by Rachel Greenley about Americans’ obsession with nuclear bombs and nuclear power, this opinion piece in the New York Times about downwinders and nuclear tests, and this feature in WIRED about uranium mining in Congo. n+1 magazine included a variety of interesting takes on Barbie last month, but beware that a couple do include spoilers.
A living history of the humble paper airplane
As every kid knows, there are numerous ways to fold a paper airplane, and lots of factors affect how a plane soars, glides, or plummets and smashes its tip. Physicists study paper airplanes too, both for applications to fluid dynamics and to learn lessons for larger aircraft. Interesting piece in Popular Mechanics by Sarah Wells and Jennifer Leman.
Waiting for the lights
The Iranian diaspora has had to watch and express solidarity from abroad, while trying to support the feminist protest movement that grew following the killing of Mahsa Amini. But as Amir Ahmadi Arian writes in Harper’s, any reform or revolution will have to be led by activists in Iran, not those making statements from afar.
How do melting glaciers and ice sheets affect the planet?
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay up there. The Thwaites Glacier—dubbed the “doomsday glacier”—is gradually collapsing, and as Elizabeth Rush writes eloquently in The Atlantic, if it continues to do so, sea levels around the world will rise significantly. The same goes for Greenland ice sheets, which Sarah Kaplan and her colleagues write about in the Washington Post, combined with excellent photography and graphics, too.
Nothing to see here
I recommend this essay, which isn’t just about invisibility but also about optics, science fiction, and light and darkness, by James Gleick in the New York Review of Books. I also enjoyed this essay by Michelle Nijhuis about the wildlife trade and humans’ treatment of animals.
What I’m reading: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. I had never gotten around to reading it before.
Looking back: Two years ago, I wrote my first story for WIRED as a staff writer, about the plucky Perseverance rover beginning its rock sample collection on Mars.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and in 2022 I moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. I used to be a freelance 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.