Inverse - 👑 All hail King Thanos

Tuesday

Sept 13 2022

All hail King Thanos!

On Saturday, Disney unleashed a deluge of announcements, updates, and trailers from Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios. But the 99-year-old company saved the best for last. On Sunday, at a panel devoted to Disney Parks, Marvel boss Kevin Fiege took the stage once again to announce to return of Thanos in an Avengers-themed ride. This variant of the big purple supervillain, titled “King Thanos,” apparently won in Avengers: Endgame. He also has a totally sweet beard. Beyond that, we know virtually nothing about the character or the theme park ride where he’s set to debut.

Thankfully, Disney had a lot of other news to share, from the first trailer for The Mandalorian Season 3 to the official lineup for Thunderbolts (Marvel’s Suicide Squad-style team-up slated for July 2024). You can get a rapid-fire rundown of all the biggest news right here, and read on for the latest stories from Inverse below.

What's New

THE WAY

Star Wars

Mandalorian Season 3 trailer reveals a shocking new enemy

We’re in a new golden age of Star Wars. Despite the fact we aren’t getting any Star Wars movie updates at D23, there’s no shortage of exciting developments. As with all recent announcements, the crown jewel is The Mandalorian, the series that launched Disney+ and carried it ever since through its unique adventure series and the serialized spin-offs it cultivated like The Book of Boba Fett and the upcoming Ahsoka.

But Din Djarin isn’t stopping just yet. Last we saw Mando, he was ousted from his sect for removing his helmet. Now he’s searching for forgiveness, which is only attainable through the “Living Waters of Mandalore,” whatever that means. Thankfully in the trailer for The Mandalorian Season 3, we now have an idea.

Watch here

Skrulls

Marvel

Secret Invasion trailer reveals Nick Fury’s thrilling new mission

MCU fans are getting closer to finding out which of their favorite superheroes has been a Skrull this whole time. At D23 last weekend Marvel released the official trailer for Secret Invasion, the forthcoming Disney+ show about the alien shapeshifters starring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Previously, the show has been billed as a darker and grittier chapter in the multi-project Marvel Studios franchise, potentially involving a political conspiracy tied to the shapeshifting Skrulls.

While the full plot synopsis has yet to be revealed, we know Secret Invasion will center around the Skrulls, introduced to the MCU in the 2019 film Captain Marvel.

First introduced as villains, those Skrulls were, in fact, refugees running from the militaristic Kree alien army. At the end of Captain Marvel and in the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home, we are shown the Skrulls have kept themselves hidden in plain sight thanks to their special shapeshifting powers while working directly with Fury (and posing as him on Earth).

ANTI-HEROES

Marvel

Thunderbolts will reunite one of Marvel Phase 4’s best duos

Marvel Studios’ presentation at this year’s D23 Expo was far more understated than fans likely expected. Aside from a handful of trailers for titles like Werewolf by Night and Secret Invasion, Marvel’s announcements mostly confirmed details that fans had already heard about, including the studio’s decision to put WandaVision director Matt Shakman at the helm of 2024’s Fantastic Four.

That said, this year’s Expo saw Marvel finally announce the cast of Thunderbolts, the anti-hero-centric film set to end Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fans had been speculating about its cast since it was announced earlier this year, and Marvel finally made the roster official.

In doing so, Marvel also confirmed one unexpected but welcome Black Widow reunion that fans can look forward to seeing when Thunderbolts hits theaters in 2024.

Burning Up

Climate

Hottest summer ever: 2022 broke records all over the world

Between expansive wildfires, catastrophic flooding, and suffocating heat waves, summer 2022 has been extremeon many counts.

Now, the numbers are in. Recent data analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Programme shows that summer 2022 — defined as June through August — broke several records across the globe.

Learn more

Feature

Science

“Space is hard”: How tragedy and ambition have shaped NASA’s Artemis I mission

NASA’s Artemis I will culminate in an expensive, overdue but thrilling space mission to the Moon… when it launches. Now battling yet another delay to the mission, the story of Artemis I has unraveled over the course of decades. In fact, the mission’s history is perhaps best defined by unexpected twists, turns, and abandoned plans.

Artemis I is an Apollo-era mission for the 21st century. NASA once again plans to take a series of bold yet incremental steps to deliver humans to space, but now it wants to take our kind farther from our planet and for longer stretches of time than ever before.

This latest sojourn to the Moon is not just a frequently delayed $50 billion step on the road to cosmic expansion — it is also the byproduct of political ambitions, a 21st-century aerospace tragedy, and a paradigm shift in cultural ideas about who goes to space.

“It is exciting to watch Artemis reach fruition,” Thomas Ellis, a teaching fellow on American foreign relations at the London School of Economics, tells Inverse. “Like the much-delayed James Webb [Space] Telescope, it’s something that has been in development for a long time.”

But unlike Webb, Artemis is yet to prove itself a success — or even launch at all. Webb was built on a promise it would “unveil the universe,” and so far, it has done just that. Whether Artemis will deliver on its commitment remains to be seen.

Meteorites

Innovation

This space diamond could transform manufacturing on Earth

Over four billion years ago, when the solar system was still young, an asteroid hundreds of miles in diameter rammed into one of the many equally large hunks of rock spinning chaotically around the sun.

The impact flung a massive fan of semi-molten rock out into space, where it cooled into millions of smaller pieces. In the billions of years since, a few of these asteroids, also known as ureilites, have fallen to Earth. Scientists can distinguish them by their distinct chemical composition.

“Ureilites are a type of meteorite known as achondrite, which basically means they formed at very high temperatures, probably deep within the asteroid that they came from,” says Andrew Tomkins, a geologist at Monash University in Australia.

These space rocks intrigue scientists because they’re some of the only available samples that come from inside a large asteroid — so they contain helpful clues as to how large bodies formed in our nascent solar system. But there are few ureilites around today.

One dead giveaway that you’re dealing with a rare ureilite: Diamonds. Lots of diamonds.

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