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Star Wars Rebels: Twilight Of The Apprentice
Cable channel Disney XD premieres the 34th and 35th episodes of the series Star Wars: Rebels, a CGI animated storyline falling between the original and prequel trilogies of the Star Wars saga. James Earl Jones guest stars as Darth Vader, and this story reintroduces the character of Darth Maul and closes the series’ second season.
More about Star Wars: Rebels in the LogBook
Star Wars: Rebels now streaming on Amazon Prime
The 86th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Neal McDonough (Boomtown) guest stars.
The CW airs the ninth episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Arthur Darvill, Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz and Victor Garber. 
Commercial spaceflight operator Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, launches its fourth New Shepard flight. The uncrewed (but human-rated) capsule and its single-stage suborbital booster come in for soft landings near Blue Origin’s Texas launch facility. This is the third flight for the second New Shepard reusable capsule, as well as the third flight for the second New Shepard reusable booster; both will be flown again later in 2016.
SpaceX launches the unmanned Dragon CRS-8 (Commercial Resupply Mission 8) to the International Space Station, carrying supplies and experiments, as well as delivering via its cargo trunk the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), the first new addition to the ISS since 2011. The flight is a success, and for the first time, the Falcon 9 first stage returns intact to an unmanned drone barge in the Atlantic Ocean, where it can be refurbished and reused. Though SpaceX has previously brought an intact booster down on dry land, this is the first success in several attempts to recover the spent first stage at sea.
Welsh-born actor Gareth Thomas, who starred as Roj Blake in the BBC’s influential space opera 
For the first time since the final 
The 41st episode of The Flash, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ superhero starring Grant Gustin, airs on the CW.
Astronomers reveal that Makemake, an icy dwarf planet orbiting in the distant Kuiper Belt region of the solar system, has a moon, first spotted in 2015 by a team using the Hubble Space Telescope. (The news comes just days after the 26th anniversary of Hubble’s launch.) With an estimated diameter of 100 miles (compared to the 870 mile diameter of its parent body), the satellite orbits Makemake at a distance of 13,000 miles, taking twelve days to complete one orbit. Previous observations failed to pick up on the dark, dim body due to the relatively bright glare of Makemake itself. 
JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, declares the Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite a total loss, having lost all contact with it. Though the diagnosis of the evidence to date is ongoing, engineers conclude from the available data that Hitomi entered an uncontrolled spin and broke up in orbit. JAXA offers apologies not only to other countries’ space agencies who supplied equipment for Hitomi, as well as to astronomers who had hoped to use the satellite.
Japanese synthesizer pioneer Isao Tomita dies of heart failure at the age of 84. A classically trained composer, Tomita had composed music for such early anime series as Kimba The White Lion, and such live action series as Mighty Jack, prior to importing (at no small expense) a Moog III synthesizer. He experimented with all-synth interpretations of classical music with albums like Snowflakes Are Dancing and The Planets, which quickly became his primary career track as these albums became successful worldwide. He eventually resumed his film/TV scoring career in the 1990s, contributing music to The Twilight Samurai and Welcome Home, Hayabusa. He was working on a new stage musical at the time of his death.
Private space launch contractor SpaceX once again successfully lands the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket after the booster lifts a Japanese communications satellite into a parking orbit (from which the second stage propels the satellite to geostationary orbit). This second consecutive landing of a Falcon 9 first stage takes place at sea again, with the booster coming in for a faster landing then its 
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirms the observations of Earthbound astronomers with high-powered telescopes: a new dark atmospheric feature has emerged on the planet Neptune, signifying a major new storm system in the planet’s atmosphere. The new vortex feature emerges near the south polar area of Neptune, and was first observed by telescope in 2015.