“Next month’s Part Three may well be the point at which we discover that this saga’s chosen one, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, is actually Darth Vader with better hair.”
-Comment by Guardian film writer Ben Child in his article “If Dune is This Generation’s Star Wars, We Are All in Big Trouble.” Expect more analysis and commentary given that Dune: Part Three is scheduled for release on December 18th.
This week’s space image was captured by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope, launched in July 2023. The is the first batch of data being released as part of the space telescope’s mission to map the universe.
Here is the ESA’s explanation of what you are seeing:
As part of this very large data release, Euclid observed the core of the Messier 81 galaxy group…The haze dominating the right side of the frame is the star-filled disc of Messier 81, the largest galaxy in the group. It shows how Euclid clearly captured individual stars within this disc. Many background galaxies are visible across this image, including red-hued galaxies lying far from us and distant spirals with blue swirling arms. The loose collection of blue stars seen just left of centre is a dwarf irregular galaxy known as Holmberg IX. Gravitational interactions between Messier 81 and Messier 82 may have sparked star formation in this galaxy. The Messier 81 galaxy group lies around 12 million light-years away from us.
Mark your calendars for one week from today, November 18th, when Voyager 1 will be exactly one light-day away from Earth. After 50 years of traveling through and then out of the solar system, the little spacecraft will be about 16 billion miles away – a distance that takes light one full day to reach.
In celebration of this event, on November 17th NASA will have a Shine Bright for Voyager’s Light‑Day. All you have to do that day is shine a light into the sky so that the beam will reach the same point in space as the Voyager 1 spacecraft the following day. Of course, your light beam may be going in a completely opposite direction, but you get the point.
You can even blink VGR in Morse code. If that sounds like fun, NASA has instructions on the site to help you.
If you need more information on the travel time and distance of either Voyager 1 or 2, this NASA site will help you.
And if you want to stand in your backyard again to celebrate Voyager 1’s light-year, you will have to wait at least 17,000 years. Good luck with that.
“Two years, we went from Apollo 4, an uncrewed mission, to Apollo 11, where our astronauts were landing and walking on the moon here. Let’s not just take the idea that we should be trying to do things on a reasonable timeline means it is inherently unsafe. That’s an insult to everyone that comes to NASA and industry, and certainly the pioneers from decades past that know how this is done.”
-Statement by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in response from a question by WESH 2 news about safety versus speed. This comes the same week that NASA is seeking bids on $10 billion in new contracts for lunar cargo flights. Given the number of companies involved, it appears NASA will have the support it needs. But while the Moon missions are going well, SpaceX’s recent announcement that it is retiring its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule may put travel to the International Space Station (ISS) at risk. It will be strange if the US can get to the Moon but not the ISS.
Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.
—Scientific America: “NASA Reveals New Lunar Rover, PROMISE, to Launch to Moon in 2028“
NASA officials on Saturday stressed that the agency is working to speed up testing and development of the hardware that will ensure human missions to the moon. The agency plans to have rovers and other infrastructure already waiting on the moon to greet any human crews when they do eventually arrive there. This is critical, according to NASA chief Jared Isaacman: “the missions themselves will help us characterize an environment that we’ve really not visited in a very long time,” he said at Saturday’s press event…One of the biggest updates to that ambition is the decision to fly a rover, PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration), which is modeled after the Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity. Previously only proposed as a possibility by Isaacman, PROMISE will fly to the moon and land using a Blue Origin lander in late 2028 for an 18-month primary mission.
—Business Times: “Pakistani Astronaut to Join China’s Shenzhou-24 Space Mission“
A Pakistani astronaut will join China’s space station as a payload specialist on the upcoming Shenzhou-24 mission as the Chinese state media reported on Saturday. The milestone marks the first foreign visitor to China’s space station and the first joint spaceflight featuring both Chinese and foreign astronauts in the history of China’s manned space program…In February 2025, China and Pakistan signed an agreement covering astronaut selection, training and participation in Chinese space station flights. Following a rigorous three-stage assessment, two Pakistani pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud were selected as candidates and have been training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing. While one will carry out the primary flight mission and the second will serve as a backup.
—Vice: “There’s a 93-Billion-Mile Structure in Space, and Astronomers Can’t Fully Explain It“
In a study published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers at the University of Arizona made a major discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope. They caught a visible-light glimpse of a gargantuan, 93-billion-mile-long cosmic dust feature dubbed the “Cat’s Tail,” sitting just 63 light-years away in the Beta Pictoris system. If you’re trying to wrap your brain around that scale, this thing is roughly 1,000 astronomical units long, long enough to wrap between the Earth and the Sun about 500 times. If I put it in the only measurable terms Americans are familiar with, it would be about 1.3 billion American football fields, endzones included.
Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.
