Image (Credit): One artist’s version of a Martian base. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
“So, who should have the right to acquire property in space? My answer: those who have the financial means to get there, develop, and use the land. For instance, if SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and starts to build permanent settlements on the red planet, then the ownership of land should go to SpaceX first. Not of the entire planet, of course, but of a practicable area, for example the size of Singapore. The surface area of Mars is 200,000 times that of Singapore, so SpaceX would initially only own 0.0005 percent of Mars. That would be enough to develop multiple settlements, but not so many that others would no longer have a chance.”
-Statement by Rainer Zitelmann, a historian and sociologist, in his Reason magazine article titled “Why You Can’t Settle Mars or Colonize the Moon Without Real Property Rights.” You do not need to agree with his conclusion, but he discusses a timely topic. The Moon Agreement and Outer Space Treaty may need to be revisited now that the idea of permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars are not simply science fiction, as they were in the 1960s and 1970s when these provisions were agreed to (and not by all nations, keep in mind).
Image (Credit): An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts head to the ISS aboard a Soyuz rocket launched earlier today from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
With their arrival, Expedition 74 will come to a close by month’s end and Expedition 75 will begin.
The Expedition 74 crew currently on the ISS includes NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams; European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot; and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev.
Expedition 75 will begin once NASA’s Williams and Roscosmos’s Kud-Sverchkov, and Mikaev depart the station after an eight month mission.
With all of the attention on the Chinese and race to the Moon, it is sometimes easy to forget that Russian cosmonauts have been working together with NASA aboard the ISS for over 25 years. The first crew on the ISS in November 2000 was composed of NASA astronaut William M. Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri P. Gidzenko and Sergei K. Krikalev (shown below). The three were the Expedition 1 crew, and stayed aboard the station until March 2001.
Image (Credit): Expedition 1 crew members (from left to right) Sergei K. Krikalev, Yuri P. Gidzenko, and William M. Shepherd in the ISS’s Zvezda Service Module. (NASA)
The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted approval to Reflect Orbital to proceed with testing its innovative Earendil-1 satellite. This spacecraft features a substantial mirror engineered to redirect sunlight towards the nighttime side of Earth. The primary objective of the startup is to augment energy supply to solar power facilities and illuminate extensive regions up to 5 kilometers in width. By the year 2035, the company intends to deploy a constellation comprising 50,000 such orbital reflectors.Notwithstanding the potential advantages for agriculture and emergency services, the initiative has elicited grave concerns within the community.
The space between stars just got a little sweeter. Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars. Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it.
Low Earth orbit is becoming increasingly crowded with satellites, and they’re quietly erasing our view of the Universe…Chaturvedi and a team of researchers in the UK think they might have the answer: Vantablack 310, a specific formulation of one of the blackest materials ever developed, intended for use on spacecraft. In lab tests, coating satellites with Vantablack 310 meant that only 2 percent of incoming light was reflected.
It’s not really about Paul Atreides. Paul may be Lisan al-Gaib, he may be the Kwisatz Haderach, but Paul is not actually the main character of the Dune franchise. Instead, that honor goes to the character introduced in the latest trailer for Dune: Part Three, the character you knew as Duncan Idaho. The latest trailer shows the internal fractures in Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) life as he continues the Fremen jihad launched after he dethroned Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) at the end of the previous movie. His partner Chani (Zendaya) feels betrayed by his actions and his legal wife, Shaddam IV’s daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) joins the plot that the Face Dancer Scytale (Robert Pattinson) launches against him. Central to this conspiracy is the introduction of the man we first met as Duncan Idaho, played by Jason Momoa. Despite what he appears to be, this man is actually called Hayt, and he is the most important character in Frank Herbert‘s Dune novels.
Imagine a future Earth where bodily and mental modifications are the standard. The internet, riddled with rogue AI, has become a sequestered and dangerous pseudo-entity known as the Snarl. Humanity has expanded beyond Earth to settle on other planets. The forefront of technology includes spaceships made from synthetic organic materials resembling internal human organs. In central focus of this society of the future, and in focus of the novel to be discussed today, are a collection of six metallic coin-shaped technologies called niks. Niks are implanted in the brains of a lineage of children, giving them incredible powers of intuition—and lifespans that end at the onset of puberty. When one child dies, the niks are removed from their head, and the next child is chosen. This initial description can hardly begin to cover the scope and depths of The Sixth Nik, a new science fiction novel from the accomplished Daniel Kraus.
Foundation Season 4 still has no official release date, but it is expected to arrive in 2027. The explosive Season 3 finale set up some great storylines that both extend what’s already been adapted from the Isaac Asimov novels and other subplots that are original to the Apple TV project. Like many familiar with the source material, I was caught massively off-guard by the writers changing the true identity of the Mule at the end of last season. It was one of the biggest twists in the novels, and the adaptation was bold enough to include a huge bait-and-switch. As such, I think it’s fair to say that reading the books doesn’t guarantee knowledge of what’s to come in Foundation Season 4.
Note: Do not forget to watch the third official trailer for the upcoming Dune: Part Three movie.
Image (Credit): An artist’s rendering of the Milky Way Galaxy illustrating the results of the recent study discussed below. The position of our Sun is also provided in the image.(ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, ESA/XMM-Newton and NASA/Chandra)
The details of the spiral structure of the Milky Way are still debated due to the large uncertainties in the distance estimates obtained through the most common tracers. However, X-ray dust scattering rings produced by short extragalactic X-ray transients provide a direct method to measure the 3D distribution of interstellar clouds up to the edges of our Galaxy with a precision of a few percent. We report on an analysis of all the available XMM-Newton and Chandra follow-up observations of three low-latitude gamma-ray bursts: GRB 031203 (l ≃ 255°, b ≃ −5°), GRB 160623A (l ≃ 84°, b ≃ −3°), and GRB 221009A (l ≃ 53°, b ≃ 4°). The previous detection of X-ray rings in these observations, produced by dust clouds located beyond 5 kpc, can be associated with dust in the Perseus, Outer, and Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms, thus providing direct distance measurements to these structures along three distinct lines of sight. We identify two additional rings in the direction of GRB 160623A produced by dusty clouds at 6.91 ± 0.06 kpc and 9.9 ± 0.6 kpc, and we confirm – through a second XMM-Newton observation – the presence of one cloud at 9.7 ± 0.4 kpc toward GRB 031203. We also accurately measured the distance of dusty clouds up to 19.0 ± 0.2 kpc based on the analysis of one Chandra and four XMM-Newton observations of GRB 221009A. The small statistical and systematic uncertainties of these measurements place tight constraints on the geometry of the outer Milky Way and reveal significant deviations from current models, which critically depend on spectroscopy-based Galactic rotation curves at large distances.
Citation: Vaia, B., Fornasiero, I., Tiengo, A. et al. Accurate distances of the Galactic spiral arms from dust-scattered X-ray emission of gamma-ray bursts. A&A (2026).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202557431
Study-related stories:
Live Science – “’Astronomers Have To Revise Estimates’: The Milky Way May Be Larger, Heavier and More Lopsided Than We Realized”
Earth Sky – “The Milky Way’s Arms Might Not Look As We Thought”
Our Awesome Universe 