The Week in Space History- November 4th to the 10th

Let’s head to Romulus and start off with some pop culture history.

On November 4th, 1991, The Star Trek the Next Generation Episode “Unification Part” 1 aired on Television.

“Unification” is a two-part episode where Picard and Data travel to Romulus to determine why Ambassador Spock traveled to the Romulan homeworld in secret.

No spoilers, but there is political intrigue with galactic implications; plus great performances by Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, and his father in real life Mark Leonard, who plays Sarek, Spock’s father.

It looks like the Romulans are going to play a big role in the upcoming “Star Trek: Picard” series that begins in January of 2020. I’m excited to see what’s happened on Romulus since these episodes and the last Star Trek movie with the crew from The Next Generation.

Now, it’s time some spooky space science.

On November 4th, 2003, the largest X-ray flare ever observed from our Sun was recorded as an X28 flare. This was part of the “Halloween solar storms” in 2003. The European Space Agency notes that the “associated coronal mass ejection (CME) came out of the Sun’s surface at about 2300 kilometers per second (8.2 million km/h).” That’s…