Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STScI)

Links for the top five stories:

Lumpy Lunar Gravity
Curiosity’s Next Journey
Tracking Space Warps
Smallest Galaxy Ever Found
Hypervelocity Stars

Credit:NASA

Links for the top five stories:

Printing Pizza for Astronauts
Magnetar Glitch
Opportunity Breaks a Record
Kepler’s Flywheel Woes
A Galactic Collision

Credit: Rob Shenk/Flickr

Links for the top 5 stories:

Why Barns Are Red

Light Pollution Gets Crowded

An X-Classy ‘Af-flare‘

Moon and Earth Share Common Water Source

Ancient Underground Oasis

Space Oddity

Links for the top 5 stories:

Virgin Galactic Powers Up

One-Way Ticket to Mars

Most Famous Canadian YouTuber (in Space)

Saturn Hurricane

Antarctica’s Supernova Sand

5) Star Factory

About 880 million years after the Big Bang, a huge galaxy was building new stars at an incredible pace. An international team of astronomers discovered the galaxy HFLS3 with help from 12 observatories all over the world.

HFLS3 is a starburst galaxy, which means it turns gas into stars at an extremely high rate. In fact, the enormous galaxy can draw on roughly 100 billion solar masses worth of gas to create about 3,000 stars a year. This production rate is 2,000 times greater than the Milky Way’s.

The prolific stellar factory is 12.8 billion light years from Earth, which means researchers see it as it was 12.8 billion years ago, when the universe was still a youthful sixpercent of its age now. This glimpse into the distant past could help scientists figure out when the universe developed the right conditions for galaxy formation.

You can read more about the massive star-making galaxy in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature.

4) Five New Exoplanets

This week, a report in the journal Science, announces the discovery of five new exoplanets orbiting the distant star Kepler 62. Scientists think the star’s two outermost planets have a radius about 1.5 times that of our own planet, making them Super Earths.  And there’s a chance they could harbor water, a necessary ingredient for life.

But just like other planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope, we can’t know for sure what’s on their surface. Kepler measures changes in light from very faint stars as their planets pass in front.  These planets are too far away to directly measure light leaving their surface and so we can’t verify their chemical makeup. Kepler 62 and its planets, for example, are about 1200 light years away.

Kepler looks deeply and narrowly into space, but this tunnel vision means we could be missing habitable exoplanets much closer to home. These planets would be close enough to measure light from their surface. That’s why two weeks ago, NASA announced a new telescope mission named TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will launch in 2017. TESS will scan an area 400 times that of Kepler to catch the brightest stars and, hopefully, the closest habitable exoplanets.

3) Saturn’s Ring Rain

Since the 1980s, astronomers have suspected that Saturn’s rings release water onto the planet’s surface. But now, a more detailed study reveals this rain is more frequent and covers larger regions of the planet than we expected.

When charged water particles from Saturn’s rings fall to the upper atmosphere far below, they reduce the electron density. This has a major effect on the types of particles and the temperature in Saturn’s atmosphere. And these changes are visible as a pattern of dark bands stretching across the planet’s surface.

Light-sensitive images from Hawaii’s Keck Observatory let astronomers study these bands in more detail than ever before. They found the dark areas cover about 30 to 43 percent of the atmosphere’s surface, which is a greater area than previous images of Saturn indicated.

You can read more about the rainy rings in the April 11 issue of the journal Nature.

3) Naming Controversy

If you’ve spent any time watching this show, you know exoplanets get saddled with terrible names like HR8799c and similar jumbles of letters and numbers. So why can’t we just rename them: Blame the International Astronomical Union, or IAU.

An organization called Uwingu is currently running a contest where you can pay to nominate and vote for the name of the closest known exoplanet– currently called Alpha Centauri B b. In response, the IAU announced you can’t buy the right to name a planet. According to their statement, “Such schemes have no bearing on the official naming process. The IAU wholeheartedly welcomes the public’s interest to be involved in recent discoveries, but would like to strongly stress the importance of having a unified naming procedure.”

Uwingu responded to the IAU by emphasizing the goal is to choose a popular nickname, not an official title. In the future, the IAU hinted they may consider adopting popular names for exoplanets. Until then, we’re stuck with alphabet soup.

1) Missing Mars Lander Found

Back in 1971, a Soviet mission made the first successful soft landing on the red planet. Unfortunately, the lander named Mars 3 transmitted for less than 15 seconds before the signal went dead. All traces of the failed mission disappeared–until now.

A group of Russian space fans has been looking for the long-lost lander in images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Specifically, they’ve been pouring over a November 2007 photo of Mars 3′s last known location. But the photo contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, a resolution so high they needed to crowd-source the search. Finally, in December, they found candidates for four pieces of Mars 3’s hardware: the parachute, the heat shield, the retrorocket, and the lander.

And a new photo taken last month shows what looks to be the same objects. Although there could be another explanation, it’s exciting to imagine we’ve rediscovered a piece of space history. Plus, the news pairs nicely with recent images of the parachute that helped Curiosity land safely on Mars.

—Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick & Eric R. Olson

[The text above is a modified transcript of the video.]

5) Voyager Hokey Pokey

What is going on with Voyager 1? Two weeks ago, the American Geophysical Union, or AGU, announced the space probe had finally left our solar system, which is incredibly exciting. Except it’s not exactly true.

Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched in 1977, checked out a couple planets, and then kept going. The spacecraft are currently on a mission to explore beyond the edges of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble surrounding our solar system. As they travel, the probes are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays. And in August of last year, the intensity of the local cosmic rays hitting Voyager 1 dropped, replaced by interstellar ones.

The most recent paper suggests Voyager 1 has exited the heliosphere, inspiring the announcement about the probe’s escape from our solar system. But although the particle data may be suggestive, it’s not enough to prove Voyager 1 is gone. According to scientists involved with the mission, the probe has not registered the magnetic field changes they’d expect to see at the edge of our system. Voyager 1 hasn’t left quite yet—it’s just in a new region of the heliosphere.

4) Mini-Supernovae

Supernovae now come in a brand new category: Type Iax.

If the name didn’t give it away, a Type Iax supernovae is closely related to a Type Ia. Ia supernovae occur in binary systems where a white dwarf star orbits a companion star. The strong gravity of the dense white dwarf actually steals material away from its companion, until the dwarf gets too big and explodes. This distinctive explosion is about 5 billion times brighter than our sun. But astronomers have discovered 25 supernovae that are much dimmer than expected, with only a hundredth of a Type Ia’s brightness.

The newly named Type Iax supernovae probably occur when the companion star has already lost its outer layer of hydrogen, leaving only helium for the white dwarf to strip away. The different process leads to a different type of explosion, one the white dwarf might manage to survive.

There’s still a lot to learn about Type Iax supernovae, but they may be a third as common as Type Ia’s, so scientists have plenty of opportunities for further study. You can find out more in The Astrophysical Journal.

3) Mercury Meteorite

Did we find a piece of the planet Mercury buried in our own backyard? If so, it will be the first time on record.

University of Washington scientist Anthony Irving has been studying 35 green-colored meteorites (pdf) found in Morocco in 2012. The meteorites are 4.56 billion years old–older than the Earth itself.

And they’re low in iron, with the weakest magnetic intensity of any known rock. This seems to match up with what the Messenger spacecraft tells us about Mercury’s surface. Irving thinks the strange rocks were ejected from a hot, magma-covered body. But we won’t know for sure that body was Mercury, until we can bring back a sample from the tiny planet’s surface.

2) Planck’s Map

When telescopes peer into space, they’re not just looking across distances—they’re also looking back in time. And the Planck space telescope’s peek into the past has revealed our universe is older than we thought.

The Planck mission studies the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Temperature variations in the CMB can reveal important facts about our universe, such as when the Big Bang happened. And the Planck satellite is very sensitive to these variations—it can even detect changes of a millionth of a degree. Its measurements have created the most accurate map ever of the CMB.

The map contains so much information, cosmologists are still sorting through it. But it pretty much supports the current model of the universe, just with better data. For example, the map confirms the universe is lopsided. And suggests it’s 13.82 billion years old, 80 million years older than we thought. We also have more accurate numbers for how fast the universe is expanding, and for the ratio of matter to dark matter to dark energy.

1) Birth of Massive Stars

There are some incredibly massive stars out in the universe. The problem is, they shouldn’t exist.

In order to get larger, a star must pull in matter from its surroundings. But the bigger it gets, the more radiation it emits, pushing away the very material it needs to keep growing. This should make it impossible for any star to reach a status called high-mass, defined as eight times the mass of our own sun.

Yet these massive stars exist. To discover how they form, the Herschel Space Observatory focused on W3, a giant gas cloud 6200 light years away. W3 acts as a stellar nursery for both low- and high-mass stars. As the astronomers discovered, a community of older stars is key to the development of high-mass bodies. When young stars begin to grow within a cluster of older ones, the elders funnel material to the youngsters, allowing them to reach a more massive size. This type of environment, where young stars can continuously accumulate and confine new matter, is crucial to the growth process.

You can read more about the study in The Astrophysical Journal.

—Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick & Eric R. Olson

[The text above is a modified transcript of the video.]

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Exoplanet Composition

Scientists have determined the chemical composition of an exoplanet’s atmosphere–129 light years away. The planet is a gas giant five to ten times more massive than Jupiter and it lives in a solar system along with four other gassy planets.

Using data from Hawaii’s Keck telescope, scientists have determined the planet’s atmosphere is made up mostly of water vapor and carbon monoxide. They were able to figure this out by directly analyzing light from the planet. Usually, information about exoplanets is obtained indirectly, by measuring their effect on the orbit of the parent star. But HR8799c circles its sun at about the same distance as Pluto orbits our sun. This allowed scientists to isolate its light from the background radiation.

The scientists also found the atmosphere contains a slightly higher ratio of carbon to oxygen than its parent star. This tells us the planet likely formed from a ball of ice and dust, which grew slowly, attracting more and more space dust from the embryonic solar system.

You can read more about this fascinating exoplanet in the March 15 issue of the Journal Science.

4) Neighborhood Dwarves

Prepare a house-warming gift and get ready to greet our new neighbors. Penn State University astrophysicist Kevin Luhman has discovered a binary system of two brown dwarfs right next door to our Sun. And by next door, we mean 6.5 light years away.

It sounds like a pretty large separation, but only two known star systems are closer to home, and we found them almost a century ago.

So why did it take us so long to discover this binary system, dubbed WISE 1049-5319? Well, it’s made up of very dim objects. Brown dwarfs are bigger than planets but smaller than stars, and they emit so little light that our telescopes have trouble picking them out.

But they couldn’t hide from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE for short. Given how long it took us to find them, we could have more brown dwarfs right under our noses. Our neighborhood might be more heavily populated than we ever expected.

You can find out more about the brown dwarf binary system in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

3) Comet Pan-STARRS

Last week the comet Pan-STARRS dipped within the orbit of mercury, making its tail visible in the night sky. Although, its light is already dimming, you might still be able to see it faintly until the end of March. But if you missed out altogether, no need to worry. In November, we can expect an even larger, brighter comet named ISON. Astronomers are calling it “the comet of the century” and think it could shine even brighter than the moon.

2) Martian Love Boat

Sure, Niagara Falls is a classic honeymoon destination. But if you really want to sweep a girl off her feet, why not carry her all the way to Mars? Multimillionaire Dennis Tito founded a non-profit foundation, with the goal of shipping a married couple to the red planet and back.

According to the plan, the couple will launch in a Space X Dragon capsule in January 2018. With a boost from the sun’s gravity, the astronauts should reach Mars by August, orbit the planet, and then return to Earth after 501 days. This is the longest continuous period any human has spent in space, and it will expose the travelers to a lot of solar radiation. Which unfortunately increases their odds of developing cancer. But Tito’s team plans to protect the couple with a radiation shield constructed from easily available materials. Namely, the astronauts’ poop.

Cancer and poop shields won’t be the only obstacles this lucky couple faces. They’ll also have to deal with each other. For one and a third years, the astronauts must live in a cramped inflatable habitat docked to the Dragon capsule–a habitat of only 17 cubic meters. Good thing Tito’s team is pre-screening applicants—they’ll need to really love each other.

1) The Methuselah Star

The oldest known star isn’t quite as old as we thought. But that’s okay—previous estimates suggested it was older than the universe itself.

For years, the star HD 140283 has been baffling astronomers. Up until 2000, observations suggested the so-called Methuselah star was 16 billion years old. Which is a serious problem when you consider our universe is only 13.8 billion years old. To get a better estimate of Methuselah’s age, researchers needed better data. So they used the Hubble Space Telescope to make a more accurate measurement of the star’s distance from Earth. With this information, and modern theories about chemical makeup and burn rate, the scientists came up with an age estimate five times more accurate than previous attempts.

They now think the Methuselah star is 14.5 billion years old, plus or minus 0.8 billion years. This is still ridiculously old, but the uncertainty means Methuselah could be as young as 13.7 billion years, which would make it younger than the universe—just barely.

To learn more about the Methuselah star, check out the study in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

—Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick & Eric R. Olson

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Mercury’s Magma Ocean

Mercury may once have contained a veritable ocean of shifting, glowing molten rock. Scientists think magma flowed over the planet’s surface more than four billion years ago.

Since March 2011, NASA’s Messenger probe has been orbiting Mercury to gather information about the planet. Messenger’s observations reveal two different types of rocks, with distinct chemical compositions.

To find out how Mercury’s rocks formed, scientists reconstructed the minerals in a lab (preview) here on Earth. Their experiments suggest the rocks originated in an ocean of magma. The magma settled into two layers, solidified, and then erupted back out onto the planet’s surface, leaving behind two distinct rock types. The whole process must have occurred shortly after Mercury’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago.

4) Flinging Space Trash

NASA estimates we now have 500,000 pieces of space junk whizzing around our planet.

Larger than a marble and traveling at speeds of up to 15,000 miles per hour, all that junk spells danger for both astronauts and satellites. Check out this hole punched through a radiator panel of the Space Shuttle Endeavour back in 2007. The wall of the radiator is solid aluminum, half an inch thick.

The latest idea for getting rid of our space trash uses the debris own momentum as a way to get around. The TAMU Space Sweeper with Sling-Sat uses two receiver cups to catch junk. Its retractable arms then change the direction of the incoming object, firing it downward into Earth’s atmosphere where it can burn up.

The beauty of this idea is the Sling-Sat can use the momentum transferred from the trash as a push-off toward its next target. According to its inventors, two engineers at Texas A&M University, this method allows the sling-sat to be smaller & more efficient and would extend its lifespan compared to a regular satellite (pdf).

3) Spectacular Solar Images

Three years ago, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a program to study the sun’s magnetic field and its effect on the earth. Recent data acquired from the observatory show several coronal mass ejections and solar eruptions. But no need to be alarmed, this doesn’t pose any major threat to us. For now, just sit back and watch the spectacular images (see video above).

2) Van Allen’s Third Belt

A new Van Allen radiation belt appeared and then disappeared from Earth’s orbit. Turns out the solar wind can really ruffle these rings.

The Van Allen radiation belts are two rings of charged particles, held in orbit around Earth by our planet’s magnetic field. Last September, NASA’s twin Radiation Storm Probes launched and began to examine the rings, recording their structure. But a couple days later, they revealed a third ring between the inner and outer belts.

Scientists think a burst of solar wind sent a shock wave through the belts, destroying part of the outer ring and splitting the leftovers in two–for a total of three belts. And the disturbances weren’t over yet. Another shock wave blasted through in October, destroying both outer rings. That left a single radiation belt, but not for long. About a week later, a third wave coasted by and restored the original two belts.

If these solar disturbances are as common as they seem, scientists will have to revamp their model of the Van Allen radiation belts.

You can check out the full study in the February 28 edition of Science (preview).

1)  Massive Black Hole Spins Near Light-Speed

A super-massive black hole, a few million times more massive than our sun, has a super spin as well: it whirls around at close to the speed of light!

Spiral galaxy NGC 1365 contains an enormous black hole more than three million kilometers across. Supermassive black holes are so big their gravity pulls in surrounding matter, creating a flat accretion disk. Those disks reflect x-ray light we can detect with instruments like NASA’s NuSTAR and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton.

The black hole’s spin affects this light, because faster-spinning holes pull their accretion disks closer. The closer the disk is to the black hole, the more it feels the effects of its gravitational pull—and the more warped its reflected x-rays become.

Data from XMM-Newton and NuStar reveal X-rays from NGC 1365′s black hole are super-warped. This means the black hole must be spinning incredibly fast, with its surface traveling at near light-speed.

The fast spin suggests that this black hole acquired its super-mass and its super-spin from one huge merger, or from a stable accretion disk. If it had picked up its mass in bits and pieces, each piece would have changed the hole’s momentum instead of contributing to a steady spin in a single direction.

You can read more in the February 27 edition of Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

—Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Supernova Space Rays

Here on Earth, we’re under constant attack from space. Charged particles, primarily protons, crash into our atmosphere at close to the speed of light. We call them cosmic rays and we’ve finally found out where they come from.

In order to travel so fast, cosmic rays need a ton of energy, more than they can get from any Earth-bound particle accelerator. Researchers suspected these particles pick up that energy from a supernova. When a star explodes, it releases a shock wave capable of charging up any protons in its path.

As those protons stream across the cosmos, they can change course, making it difficult to trace their path. But they also release gamma rays as they go, which provide a clear line back to the point of origin.

By studying four years of data, researchers have traced distinctive gamma rays back to their supernova sources, proving that cosmic rays originate in supernovae.

The paper appears in the February 15 edition of the journal Science.

4) Liquid Lunar Mystery

Scientists think small meteorites or solar wind may have carried water to our moon after it had fully formed. But the H₂O may have been around for a lot longer.

When the moon was young, it had a molten interior that solidified into the outer crust we see today. During the Apollo missions, astronauts grabbed rock samples from that crust, and brought them back to Earth for analysis. Now scientists have discovered key signs of water in those samples.

In order for water to become part of the crust, it must have existed inside of the early moon. This poses a challenge to the current model of the moon’s origin. The theory is that the collision between a large object and the young Earth blasted material into orbit around our planet. But the impact would have also ejected any hydrogen, leaving the young moon without the ingredients to make water. The moon’s damp past may throw a wet blanket over this theory—or at least force scientists to revamp their model.

You can read more about the findings in the February 17 advance online publication of Nature Geoscience (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group).

3) Red Dwarf Exoplanets

It’s always fun to find habitable exoplanets. Of course, if we want to travel to one, it would have to be close to home. Well, good news everyone—according to a new study, there could be plenty of exoplanets nearby.

Harvard researchers looked for exoplanets around red dwarfs, the most common type of star in the Milky Way. Red dwarfs are smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our own sun.

When the scientists analyzed data from the Kepler space telescope, they found six percent of red dwarf systems contain exoplanets both habitable and roughly the size of Earth (pdf). And because 75 percent of the stars closest to our solar system are red dwarfs, this means some of the exoplanets could be our neighbors, as close as 13 light years away.

2) Name Pluto’s Moons

In 2011 and 2012, the Hubble telescope discovered two additional moons circling Pluto.

Its other three moons have names from Greek and Roman mythology: Charon, Nyx and Hydra. But ever since their discovery, scientists have called the new moons P4 and P5– which seems a little unfair!

But recently, the fine folks at the SETI Institute, who discovered the moons, created an opinion poll to give them a name.

Anyone can go to SETI’s website and vote from a list of 21 mythological names. Polling closes on February 25th and the winning entries will make it to the list of candidate names sent to The International Astronomical Union.

Currently the options in the poll range from the heroic Hercules to the monstrous two-headed dog Orthrus. And as of today, the name Vulcan, of Star Trek fame, is leading by a large margin. What names would you suggest for Pluto’s moons? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to vote!

1) Meteor Attack from Space

Unless you live under a rock, you probably saw the video of a meteor exploding over Russia last week.

Experts estimate the meteor, originally an asteroid 15 meters across, released energy equivalent to 300 kilotons of TNT. The explosion rattled buildings and blew out windows in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk below.

So why didn’t we see it coming?  Well, we do have a network of telescopes searching for near-earth objects. But they’re looking for asteroids that are much bigger, between 100 meters and one kilometer across. There’s also a good chance the Russian asteroid was a dark color, making it hard to spot against the backdrop of space.

For “small” asteroids we can’t see, there may be no way to predict or prevent a strike. But for big ones like 2012 DA14, the giant space rock that buzzed Earth last week, we have a couple new tools in the arsenal.

First, the ATLAS system: eight small telescopes with 100 megapixel resolution, will begin scanning the skies twice a night, starting in 2015. The system will give a week’s warning for a 45-meter asteroid and three weeks for much larger objects.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will give us the most accurate reading yet of the Yarkovsky effect. This occurs when the heat an asteroid absorbs from the sun radiates back out, changing its trajectory. If we can measure this effect, we’ll have a better sense of if, and when, an asteroid might hit Earth.

And two scientists from California just announced an idea for obliterating any near-earth objects headed our way. Their system, called DE-STAR, would harness the sun’s power to direct a laser beam at incoming asteroids. A small beam could push a space rock off-course and a large one could whittle it down to nothing.

But until we can apply those technologies to “smaller” asteroids, we’re likely to be surprised by another attack from space.

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Sailing on Sunlight

NASA plans to launch a giant solar sail in 2014. It’s the largest sail ever created and will cover 1200 square meters; about the area of your average olympic swimming pool.

The sail, dubbed Sunjammer after a sci-fi short by Arthur C. Clarke, will be propelled along by nothing more than light. Photons from the sun will push on the sail, creating a miniscule force of 0.01 newtons. That’s a force equal to the weight of a sugar packet.

But in space you don’t need much to get moving and the sail’s final destination is nearly three million kilometers away at Lagrange point L1. This is where the gravity of the earth and the sun cancel each other out. Here, Sunjammer and future solar sails could keep watch for solar flares and objects headed towards earth.

The big advantage of solar sails like Sunjammer is they don’t have to carry their own fuel and so they can be much lighter and could travel much farther than propellant-based spacecraft. With a big boost from the Sun, NASA engineers envision giant space sails traveling beyond our solar system and even to nearby stars.

4) Supernova Outburst

Can we predict when a star is about to explode?

Scientists hope to answer that question by looking at SN 2010 mc, a type IIn supernova. These supernovae occur when a star eight to 50 times more massive than our sun collapses and then explodes. But 40 days before this particular star blew up, it spat out a chunk of mass one-hundredth the size of our sun.

Compared to the star’s total lifespan, which was about 10 million years, the 40 days between the mass expulsion and the supernova is the blink of an eye. Researchers at the Palomar Transient Factory, the ground-based astronomical survey that made the discovery, say there’s a 99 percent chance the two events are related.

By studying the exact process behind the mass outburst, the astronomers hope to predict supernovae before they begin.

The study is published in the February 7 edition of Nature.

3) Goldilocks Redefined

The habitable zone is the region around a star where it’s not too hot, and not too cold–for life to thrive. For liquid water, it’s just right, hence the nickname the “Goldilocks Zone.” But Goldilocks just got a little pickier. Scientists have redefined the region qualifying as habitable.

The new standards are based on updated information about how water and carbon dioxide are absorbed in a planet’s atmosphere. These conditions affect whether or not liquid water can exist, and thus support life, on a planet’s surface.

The new model isn’t perfect: Earth itself is teetering at the very edge of the new zone. But obviously we’re not freezing or boiling to death—the model doesn’t take into account Earth’s clouds, which reflect sunlight and help to keep our climate stable.

So, who knows, the new boundaries could be missing other habitable worlds as well.

2) Columbia’s Worms

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of NASA’s Columbia shuttle disaster, which killed all seven astronauts onboard. But did you know there were actually some survivors of the accident?

A few days after the crash, scientists discovered canisters in the wreckage filled with thousands and thousands of roundworms.

As you might remember, Columbia broke down during re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. But the worms, called c. elegans, were stored in an insulated canister tucked inside one of the shuttle’s compartments. Because several layers of material shielded the nematodes, they didn’t hit the ground with the same intensity as other objects on Columbia. This is what saved them from destruction.

The roundworms were one of 80 experiments taken to space on the shuttle. Along with c. elegans, the mission also carried insects, spiders, fish and silk worms.

The offspring of the surviving worms have since been a part of several space explorations and the subject of various studies and experiments

1) Spring on Mars

Spring on Mars isn’t exactly the same as on Earth. Instead of ice melting into water, Mars has dry ice evaporating into thin air.

During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide freezes into a cap two feet thick, covering the sand dunes on the planet’s north pole. As the temperature heats up in the spring, the solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, transforms into a gas in a process called sublimation. This springtime activity creates patterns of light ice and dark sand, clearly visible in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

So what exactly is going on? First, the frozen layer cracks open to show the sand. Then dry ice on the underside of the layer sublimates, builds up pressure, and bursts through the top, carrying sand with it. This scratches grooves into the dunes and sprays sand into fan-like shapes on top of the ice.

Mars may or may not have life—but it still has plenty of action.

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Inflatable Space Station

We’re this close to having a bouncy castle in space. NASA just ordered an inflatable module that will attach to the International Space Station.

Start up company Bigelow Aerospace won an 18 million dollar contract from NASA to build the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM. The module is just 4 meters long and 3.2 meters in diameter. That’s a little bit larger than your average car, but it’s designed to provide more living space for the ISS.

BEAM will travel to the space station in 2015, where it will be installed and inflated. For two years, the module will be monitored and tested to see how it holds up.

Then, BEAM will detach, fall towards Earth, and burn up. Because the walls of the inflatable module are about four times lighter than those currently used on the ISS, they’re much cheaper to lift into orbit. Their light weight could make blow-up modules the space technology of the future, whether used as free-floating space stations or for moon bases.

4) Monkey Launch

Last week, the Iranian space agency said it wants to launch a monkey into space–again. The first attempt, in the summer of 2011, failed. Officials gave no details about what went wrong.

According to the Iranians, within the next month a live Rhesus monkey will be launched into space aboard a Safir rocket. The monkey will reach a sub-orbit altitude and assuming everything goes to plan, return to Earth safely.

The Iranian government has said it wants send an astronaut into space by 2020 and to the moon by 2025. So, sending a monkey would be a significant first step. In the 1950s and 60s the US, French, and Russian governments tested the safety of their spacecraft by sending dogs, monkeys, and even chimps into space.

But critics of Iran’s space program are skeptical of such rocket tests and worry they are a just cover for developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload.

Politics aside, we hope the monkey makes it safely back to Earth.

3) Lunar Hedgehogs

Scientists must love sending bouncy objects into space. First it was an inflatable space station, then monkeys and now it’s spiky robots!

Researchers have proposed a mission to explore Phobos, one of the two moons circling Mars. Drafted by scientists from Stanford, NASA and MIT, the mission would have two stages. In the first, a surveyor satellite would travel to Phobos. And in the second, it would release spherical robots, called hedgehogs, onto the moon’s surface.

Because the gravity on Phobos is even weaker than on Mars, it would be difficult for a rover like Curiosity to get traction. But a spherical robot with spikes would be able to tumble, bounce and hop over the terrain. To create movement, the hedgehogs, about half a meter across, will have three rotating discs inside. This will enable them to fly in different directions and explore the surface.

While the surveyor monitors the orbit of Phobos from afar, the hedgehogs will study the chemical composition of the moon and analyze the soil and rocks.

If approved and funded, we’ll see the hedgehogs released in a decade.

2) Martian Groundwater

We already know water once flowed over the surface of Mars. Now pictures from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, suggest those waters may have run deep underground too.

Hi-res images of McLaughlin Crater show a pit 2.2 kilometers deep and 92 kilometers wide; slightly deeper and nearly three times wider than the Grand Canyon.

The pictures also reveal minerals, such as carbonate, that build up when water is present. But if a massive lake once filled the crater, where did the water come from? The Orbiter’s images show no evidence of surface streams leading to McLaughlin. So researchers suspect groundwater fed the lake instead.

This finding is particularly exciting because it suggests the Martian subsurface was once like Earth’s. And since microbes abound below our planet’s surface, life may have thrived underground on Mars as well.

The study is published in the January 20 online edition of Nature Geoscience (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group).

1) Saturn’s Super-Sized Storm

In December 2010, a giant thunderstorm broke out on Saturn. This wouldn’t normally be a big deal—similar storms form almost every Saturn-year, or once every 30 Earth years. But this storm was the longest ever recorded and it was huge.

Luckily, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was nearby to observe as the storm spread across Saturn’s surface. In the lead was a lightning-filled section called the head, followed by a circulating vortex, and trailing, a tail of clouds. To imagine the scale of this enormous storm, you have to realize the vortex alone was about as wide as Earth. Plus, the weather disruptions caused an even bigger vortex to form higher in Saturn’s atmosphere. Although this one was four times larger than the original, it was only visible in the infrared range.

After a record 200 days, the monster storm finally dissipated in June 2011, and its description was published this month (preview). But the storm hasn’t quite finished. Saturn’s atmosphere will be feeling its aftermath for years to come.

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

5) Couch Potatoes on Mars

When you’re sending a manned mission to Mars, you need to plan for every aspect of the trip; including how to get a good night’s rest. A simulated Mars mission has shown the importance of balancing activity with sleep to stay on top of your game.

For 17 months, a six-person international crew lived in confined isolation, a situation similar to the one Mars pioneers can expect. Throughout the simulation, researchers recorded each individual’s light exposure, sleep time and quality, activity levels, and workload.

As the mission progressed, the crew slowly transformed into couch potatoes. They moved less during waking hours and spent more time lying still and sleeping. And most crew members slept poorly, which affected the quality of their work.

In order for the members of a Mars mission to perform their best, the researchers suggest habitats and work schedules that mimic conditions back on Earth — not the conditions where you sink into the sofa with a bag of chips.

The study was published in the early edition of this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

4) 100 Billion Exoplanets

Astronomers now estimate our galaxy houses at least 100 billion planets.

They figured this out by training the Kepler space telescope on one particular star system, Kepler-32. This system features a star classified as an M dwarf, which is cooler and smaller than our own sun, but much more common. About 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs.

Although Kepler-32 is a fairly typical system, its orientation is special—it faces the Kepler telescope in a way that lets us see its five planets passing in front of their star. This position helped Caltech researchers discover the sizes and orbits of the planets in Kepler-32.

The astronomers were hoping to find out how Kepler-32’s planets formed. But the orientation of the system also let them calculate the probability that other stars house planets. They estimate that each M dwarf star in the Milky Way has at least one and possibly two planets in close orbit, which means our galaxy is filled with 100 to 200 billion planets.

3) Amateur Discovery

Sure, 100 billion is a big number. But it’s only an estimate, not a definite discovery. Amateur volunteers have found the signatures of 43 actual planets. And15 of them sit in habitable zones, the regions around stars where the temperature is just right for life-enabling liquid water.

This discovery comes courtesy of the Planet Hunters project, where amateur astronomers comb through public data from the Kepler telescope. This is the same telescope that gave us that estimate of 100 billion planets.

Of the 15 candidates they discovered in habitable zones, only one was confirmed through follow-up observations at Hawaii’s Keck telescope. Dubbed Ph2 b, this planet is the size of Jupiter and orbits a sun similar to our own. If it also has moons like Jupiter’s, they might be able to join the list of potentially habitable worlds.

And as amateurs and scientists keep hunting planets, this list will just keep growing.

2) Asteroid Flyby

Did you hear the Earth was buzzed by an asteroid yesterday? The asteroid Apophis flew by at a distance of 14.5 million kilometers. That’s roughly 30 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. Good thing, because it’s a huge asteroid, with a diameter close to the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Disaster averted! We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief…right?

Well, not until after February 15th. That’s when a smaller asteroid–only a football field across–will pass closer to Earth, much closer.  The asteroid will only miss us by 35,000 km. That’s well inside the orbit of the moon and even within range of some communications satellites.

Fortunately, astronomers predict the asteroid, named 2012 DA14, won’t hit Earth. Let me repeat: There’s no chance it will hit the Earth!  But assuming it did, we’d be in for some serious mayhem.  An impact would generate 120 times the energy of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

But in all likelihood 2012 DA14 will pass quietly by Earth, just like Apophis, and continue its orbit around the sun.

1) A Moon for the Moon

Why would scientists want to give our moon–a moon? Well, NASA wants to harness an asteroid and place it in orbit around our largest satellite.

The proposed mission would send a spacecraft to snag a 7-meter-wide space rock. The rock would be stored in a bag and transported to the moon. There, the asteroid would be carefully released into orbit.

According to Keck Institute scientists, capturing and delivering the asteroid could take six to ten years to complete and cost around $2.6 billion.

The scientists say this project would move us one step closer to a manned asteroid mission in 2025 and a Mars mission by 2030. The astronauts wouldn’t have to travel very far to visit an asteroid or expose themselves to the harmful space radiation that exists outside of Earth’s magnetic field. It would also make asteroid samples readily available for study and extraction of precious metals.

Does the moon deserve a moon of its very own or are there better ways NASA could spend its money?

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

2012 is almost over and it’s time take a look back at the top space stories of the past year. We’ll find out what happened in the weeks and months after the news broke. And, hey, don’t forget to tell us your top five in the comments.

5) Nearby Exoplanet

In October, an exoplanet was discovered in one of the closest star systems to the Earth. Orbiting around a star called Alpha Centauri B, the planet has a mass similar to Earth’s, but the proximity to its star makes the temperature too high to support life. This is the closest exoplanet we’ve discovered so far. So what’s stopping us from going there and exploring a new solar system?

Well, it’s the distance. This star system is four light years away from Earth. Space vehicles like the Voyager would take at least 400 centuries to get there. Scientists are currently researching ways to shorten the journey. While some suggest faster space vehicles, others are working on building spaceships that are more along the lines of time machines. They would cut through space, faster than the speed of light and bend space-time.

4) Water on Mercury

In late November, scientists discovered water on a planet beginning with the letter M–just not the one we were expecting. Data analyzed from the Messenger probe indicates the planet Mercury probably has water, in the form of ice, at its poles.

This may seem a little strange given that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and its surface temperature can reach over 400 degrees Celsius. Apparently, the water hides out in large craters nears the planet’s poles. Mercury’s rotational axis is almost perfectly perpendicular to its orbit, so its poles stay in permanent shadow, with temperatures never reaching above -170 degrees Celsius.  Scientists think the water arrived on the planet by hitching a ride on comets. It vaporized and condensed near the poles.

Launched in 2004, the Messenger spacecraft moved into orbit around Mercury in 2011. So far, it has orbited the planet 1000 times and produced over 100,000 images leading to numerous discoveries. As the data keeps pouring in we can probably expect more news on Mercury in 2013.

3) First Private Spacecraft Docks with ISS

This May, the privately owned company SpaceX made history when its Dragon capsule became the first commercially-manufactured spacecraft to dock with the ISS. In the past, it’s taken government agencies to build vehicles with this capability.

With the end of NASA’s space shuttle program, Dragon became responsible for resupplying the ISS. Although SpaceX signed a contract with NASA back in 2008, Dragon didn’t make its first official run until October of this year. But the capsule’s isn’t limited to supply runs. Dragon can also act as a free-flying spacecraft and could someday carry humans: In August, SpaceX won funding from NASA to develop Dragon for human transport.

The Dragon capsule is only one of many successes for SpaceX. With NASA and US military contracts, and plans for a colony on Mars, this company will continue to expand the private sector’s presence in space. The ascendency of SpaceX raises the question: Is the future of space travel in commercial hands? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

2) Curiosity on Mars

Private companies like SpaceX may be thriving, but NASA is hardly twiddling its thumbs. The agency pulled off a major success when the Mars Science Laboratory, better known as the Curiosity rover, touched down perfectly on August 5. While we celebrated from NASA to Times Square here on Earth, Curiosity got right to work, and boy has it been busy.

The rover has turned into quite the photographer, sending us beautiful Martian vistas, close-ups of rocks and soil, and even a self-portrait. More than an artist, Curiosity is also traveling across the planet’s surface, drilling and zapping rocks with lasers, gathering information about the soil and atmosphere, and finding proof that water once flowed on Mars.

And Curiosity’s success has inspired new plans for Mars exploration. Now, NASA wants to send another rover to the planet, and even to bring samples of Martian soil back to Earth. Stay tuned for 2020, when the new rover is scheduled to launch.

1) Higgs Discovery

In July , scientists announced the discovery of a particle matching the profile of the Higgs boson. The Higgs discovery showed the standard model of physics holds up and the universe works pretty much how scientists thought it did.  Physicist Peter Higgs had predicted the existence of the Higgs boson in the 1960s, but scientists were only able to detect it by slamming particles together at insanely high speeds inside the Large Hadron Collider.

Since then, follow up experiments have shown the initial measurements were spot on and the particle has a mass of 125 to 126 times the mass of a proton–just as predicted*.  The news made waves around the world and in a surprise move Time magazine even nominated Higgs, the particle not the scientist, as person of the year.

Unfortunately, it didn’t win and now a feeling universal sadness permeates the cosmos.

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

*Update: After filming this episode of The Countdown, new data was released that hints at multiple Higgs Bosons with masses of about 123.5 and 126.6 times the mass of a proton.

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.]

Story 5

For all those who have been dreaming of venturing into space, now is the time! For as little as… $750 million dollars, you could be the first person to step on the moon in 40 years.

Golden Spike, a private spaceflight company, announced that by 2020, it will be ready to take tourists to the moon. The company is proposing to take two-person teams and banking on already existing rockets and capsules to do the task. Even though no existing space vehicles are currently capable of a lunar landing, Space X’s soon-to-be-launched Falcon rocket might fit the bill.

Currently, the company is targeting foreign countries who could send a team of two representatives, either for research or national pride.

Story 4

On December 5th, NASA released a cloud-free animation of the Earth at night. It was created by stitching together two months worth of data from VIIRS, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite satellite.

Story 3

NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, better known as GRAIL, has mapped the gravity field of the moon, revealing that the orb is even more battered than it looks to the naked eye.

For the GRAIL mission, twin probes dubbed Ebb and Flow flew over the moon’s surface in formation, measuring how mountains and craters changed the distance between them. The satellites even detected changes in the lunar soil density. In addition to producing a colorful gravity map, GRAIL’s findings reveal the moon’s crust is thin and porous, probably due to being pulverized by many ancient impacts.

And if the young moon took a lot of hits, chances are that Earth and other planets in our solar system suffered a similar beating.

Story 2

In the comments from the last episode of The Countdown, YouTuber purplefeistygirl820 asked about the whole Mayan apocalypse nonsense. Apparently, a TV show stated:

“….the earth is going to end on 12/21/12… because the sun is in alinement [sic] with the earth and there are solar flares going on…..”

First, there’s no end to the Mayan calendar. It’s in the shape of a wheel, with one long cosmic cycle. The cycle does end on the 21st, but when you’ve gone all the way around, you just give the wheel another turn and start a new one.

Second, the sun and the moon line up with the Earth all the time. It’s a phenomenon called syzygy and it happens twice a month. All of the planets come close to lining up about every 500 years, but this isn’t going to happen on the 21st.

As for solar flares, they are part of the sun’s normal activity and get stronger over an 11-year cycle. Fortunately, we’re protected from them by the Earth’s magnetosphere, although they can cause problems for satellites.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this thought from NASA engineer Don Yeomans, who has investigated these rumors:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since the beginning of time there have been literally hundreds of thousands of predictions for the end of the world, and we’re still here.”

Story 1

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of galaxy that glows bright green. In many galaxies, the energy from a central black hole makes the gas around it glow. But in the adorably named “green bean galaxies,” the black hole is in the process of switching off. As it dims, the black hole’s energy disperses, lighting up gas throughout the galaxy. It’s a radioactive echo that will eventually fade as the radiation passes out into space.

When scientists first glimpsed an entirely glowing galaxy through the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, they were floored. They had to travel to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to find out more about this object, named J2240. Then, they had to go to a third telescope, Gemini South, to confirm the existence of more green beans. It turns out that these new galaxy types are incredibly rare. If you drew a cube with sides 1.3 billion light-years long, it would contain only a single green bean galaxy.

- Portions of the script above written by Sophie Bushwick, Eric R. Olson & Isha Soni

Story 5

In 2005, the dwarf planet Makemake passed between the Earth and a very bright star, casting a shadow known as an occultation. A new study of data collected from the occultation reveals that Makemake lacks an atmosphere.

Links:
Rare Apparition of Dwarf Planet Makemake Reveals a Largely Airless World

Story 4

Internet billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced his plans for a future Mars colony of 80,000 people.  The price tag for a flight to the Martian colony: $500,000.

Links:
Martian Colony Designed by Private Space Flight Company

Story 3

Astronomers have discovered a giant gaseous planet about 13 times the size of Jupiter.  The “super jupiter” is challenging previous notions of how planets form in solar systems with large stars.

Links:
“Super-Jupiter” Discovery Dwarfs Solar System’s Largest Planet

Story 2

The Very Large Telescope, belonging to the European Southern Observatory, has caught a glimpse of the most powerful quasar ever discovered.

Links:
Biggest Black Hole Blast Ever Could Solve Cosmological Mystery

Story 1

The moons of gas giants like Neptune and Uranus are arranged in a pattern where the smallest moons are closest to the planet and become gradually larger as you move farther out. This pattern has baffled scientists, but a new model explains how it could have emerged from rings of gas and dust similar to Saturn’s.

Links:
Solar System’s Moons May Have Emerged from Long-Gone Planetary Rings

Story 5

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson helped DC comics locate Superman’s fictional home planet Krypton in the non-fictional universe.  Because Krypton revolves around a red sun, Tyson has placed the planet in the constellation Corvus, which has a red dwarf star.

Links:
Superman’s Home Planet Krypton “Found”

Story 4

Many people living in New York City and surrounding areas are still reeling from Hurricane Sandy’s landfall on October 29th. Images from NASA, NOAA and the US Coast Guard show the damage caused by the hurricane.

Links:
Hurricane Sandy Satellite Photos: Before And After

Story 3

College kids have invented a tricorder device similar to the one used in the Star Trek series. The device can be connected to a smart phone and sense environmental data like temperature, wind speed and radiation levels.

Links:
Engineers of the Future Design Star Trek-Inspired Tricorder Device

Story 2

NASA scientists are using 3-D laser printing technology to reduce the cost of building rocket engine parts. This technology welds together powdered alloys using a laser beam and can create intricate and complex machine parts.

Links:
NASA Plans for 3-D Printing Rocket Engine Parts Could Boost Larger Manufacturing Trend

Story 1

The European Southern Observatory’s HARPS instrument has discovered what could be a super-earth exoplanet. Seven times the mass of Earth, the planet is the right distance from its sun to support carbon and water based life forms.

Links:
“Super-Earth” Alien Planet May Be Habitable For Life

Story 5

Hurricane Sandy hit New York City and surrounding areas hard this week, flooding streets and damaging homes. The full moon played a role in the severity of the flooding, due to a phenomena called syzygy.

Links:
Astronomy links full moon to Hurricane Sandy high tide

Story 4

Astronomers have detected ancient starlight from some of the first stars in the universe. They couldn’t see the light directly, however, instead relying on gamma rays from enormous black holes called blazars.

Links:
Light From Universe’s First Stars Seen
NASA’S Fermi Measures Cosmic ‘Fog’ Produced by Ancient Starlight

Story 3

The giant asteroid Vesta isn’t aging like other asteroids, retaining its youthful appearance. Several theories for Vesta’s fresh look appear in this week’s issue of the journal Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Links:
The Eternal Youth of Asteroid Vesta

Story 2

Scientists have discovered two superluminous supernovae from the early universe. They are the most distant supernovae ever detected and may be all that remains of two massive stars.

Links:
Oldest, Farthest Star Explosions Discovered in Distant Universe

Story 1

The Mars Curiosity Rover examined soil taken from the surface of Mars and found it similar in makeup and structure to soil from the Hawaiian Islands. Since this episode of The Countdown was filmed, Curiosity has also sampled the Martian atmosphere for the carbon-based molecule methane, which, on Earth, is produced primarily by living organisms.

Links:
NASA Rover’s First Soil Studies Help Fingerprint Martian Minerals
Curiosity Rover Finds No Methane on Mars–Yet

Story 5

Astronomers have discovered an Earth-mass planet circling Alpha Centauri B, a star only four light-years from our own solar system.

Links:
The Exoplanet Next-Door: Astronomers Discover World in Nearest Star System

Story 4

The retired Space Shuttle Endeavour cruised the streets of Los Angeles on the way to its new home at the California Science Center.  Endeavour was the last vehicle launched into orbit as part of  thirty-year U.S. Space Shuttle program.

Links:
Space Shuttle Endeavour: ‘Mission Accomplished’
Time-lapse video: Space shuttle Endeavour’s trek across L.A.

Story 3

A comet with the unwieldy name C/2012 S1 (ISON) is likely to pass close enough to Earth in the winter of 2013 that it will appear brighter than the moon. 

Links:
“Once in a Civilization” Comet to Zip past Earth Next Year

Story 2

Why is the moon made mostly from the same material as the Earth and not the giant object that struck the Earth 4.5 billion years ago?  Two new papers in the journal Science seek an answer to the lunar mystery.

Links:
Giant Impact Theory of Lunar Formation Gains More Credibility

Story 1

Eight million people tuned in to watch Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking “space” jump on October 14th. The only problem– it wasn’t really from space.

Links:
Why Red Bull’s Stratos Jump Was Just a Publicity Stunt—and Only Partially Successful
Could You Look Down from 24 Miles Up and Jump? Felix Baumgartner Just Did

Story 5

A team of Harvard-based astronomers have discovered two black holes cohabiting Messier 22, a globular cluster of stars.

Links:
Cluster Coexistence: Neighboring Black Holes Defy Predictions of Violent Interactions

Story 4

A far-out scheme to mitigate global warming calls for tethering space dust to a near-earth asteroid.

Links:
Asteroid Dust Could Fight Climate Change on Earth

Story 3

On October 7th, company Space X will deliver supplies to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA, the first of twelve contracted resupply flights. You can watch the launch live at 8:35pm EDT on NASA TV.

Links:
NASA Coverage Set for Oct. 7 SpaceX Launch to Space Station

Story 2

It sounds like a story straight out of a supermarket tabloid, but scientists have determined that an 11th-century Buddhist statue, stolen from Tibet by the Nazis, originally came from space.

Links:
Buddhist “Iron Man” found by Nazis is from Space

Story 1

The Curiosity Rover has found smooth rocks embedded in Martian soil, which is the most compelling evidence yet that Mars once held water.

Links:
A River Runs Through…Gale Crater

Story 5

The winners of YouTube’s SpaceLab competition learned the results of their experiments in the first-ever livestream from the International Space Station.

Links:
YouTube Space Lab: From 250 Miles Above the Earth

Story 4

Scientists have discovered a giant magnetic star with a mass 20,000 times that of the sun.

Links:
Giant Super-Magnetic Star Has Scientists Buzzing

Story 3

On the evening of September 10th, amateur astronomers witnessed a giant explosion on Jupiter’s surface.

Links:
Explosive Impact at Jupiter Spotted by Amateur Astronomers

Story 2

1600 ping-pong balls will be launched into the upper atmosphere by JP Aerospace, a do-it yourself, crowd-funded space program.

Links:
Ping-Pong Ball “Satellites” Have Balloon Ride to Edge of Space

Story 1

Scientific American posed 14 questions about science and technology to U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  One of the questions focused on the future of space exploration. 

Links:
Obama and Romney Tackle 14 Top Science Questions

Story 5

Astronauts from five different space agencies are participating in the CAVES project, an underground training exercise beneath the island of Sardinia.

Links:
Astronauts Heading Deep Underground for Spaceflight Training

Story 4

Scientists have discovered a two-star solar system orbited by two planets, an astronomical first.

Links:
Two Alien Planets Found with Twin Suns Like ‘Star Wars” Tatooine

Story 3

Voyager 1, which launched 35 years ago, was thought to be approaching the edge of our solar system. New evidence suggests it may have farther to go.

Links:
NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft May Not Be Near Edge of Solar System after All

Story 2

Data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey (WISE) has revealed millions of star-munching black holes.

Links:
NASA Spacecraft’s Census Tallies Millions of Black Holes

Story 1

NASA has announced a new Mars mission that is bound to disappoint some space fans. Looking to cut costs, the agency chose another lander mission over more adventurous, but risky options. 

Links:
NASA Unveils New Mars Mission to Probe Red Planet’s Core

Story 5

Chinese, European and Canadian scientists recently set distance records for quantum teleportation.

Links:
Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over Record Distances
Physicists Spooked by Faster-Than-Light Information Transfer
Quantum Entanglement – The Movie

Story 4

The Mars Curiosity Rover receives a morning wake-up call from NASA engineers.

Links:
NASA Reveals Mars Rover’s Morning Mix

Story 3

A physicist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory has successfully created a room-temperature Maser, a breakthrough that has eluded science for nearly 60 years.

Links:
Microwave laser fulfills 60 years of promise

Story 2

Belt-tightening at the National Science Foundation may spell the end for two ground-based radio telescopes.

Links:
Major U.S. Telescopes Face Funding Ax

Story 1

Twin satellites, named the Radiation Belt Space Probes, are about to set off on a two-year mission to explore the Van Allen radiation belt. You should be able to watch the launch early tomorrow morning (4:07 a.m. EDT) on NASA TV.

Links:
Probes Will Live in Van Allen Belts

Story 5

NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on Mars early Monday morning, setting off a worldwide celebration.

Links:

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars
Video: NASA Lands Car-Sized Rover Near Martian Mountain
Curiosity Targets Gale Crater
Mars Party of the Decade Reaches Fever Pitch

Story 4

Black holes have the size and mass to devour entire stars, although this has never been observed–until now.

Links: 

Satellites Watch Stellar Death Throes

Story 3

Scientists are beginning to understand how thunder clouds produce powerful gamma rays–and antimatter.

Links:

Thunderclouds Make Gamma Rays—and Shoot Out Antimatter, Too [Preview]

Story 2

Early in the morning on August 12th, you’ll be able to see the Perseid meteor shower, named for the constellation Perseus.

Links:

August Perseid Meteor Shower Has Long Legacy, Bright Future
Perseid Meteor Shower Weather Forecast
EarthSky’s Meteor Shower Guide for 2012

Story 1

NASA recently granted three companies 1.1 billion dollars to develop private space taxis, which will ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

Links:

NASA Chooses SpaceX to Return US Astronauts to Space
NASA Awards $1.1 Billion in Support for 3 Private Space Taxis
NASA Press Release

Episode 1: July 26, 2012

Story 5

Galaxies from the early universe usually look kind of lumpy or blobby, but scientists have spotted one with a spiral structure, making it look a lot like our own Milky Way galaxy.

See Primordial Pinwheel: Astronomers Spot Oldest Prominent Spiral Galaxy Yet.

Story 4

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Landsat program, the U.S. Geological Survey asked the public to vote on favorite images from the “Earth as Art” collection. The winner: “Van Gogh from Space.”

See Top Five Earth as Art Winners.

Story 3

The strange slowing of the Pioneer spacecraft led to many theories, including speculations of new physics. The answer seems to be recoil generated by the heat of the batteries.

See Pioneer Spacecraft Warmth Takes Heat off Relativity.

Story 2

How does a gopher manage to survive the hustle and bustle of a busy spaceport? Evidently, by staying away from the launch pad.

See Curious Kazakh Gopher Not Curious About Nearby Spaceships

Story 1

Seven minutes of terror—that’s how NASA describes the descent of the Mars lander Curiosity on August 5.  The car-sized lander will undergo complex, never-before-tried landing maneuvers in hopes of a safe touchdown.

See Mars Rover Prepares for 7 Minutes of Terror.