60-second Space

After a few false alarms, the star SN 2009ip appears to have gone supernova at last. John Matson reports

Six volunteers spent 520 days in a simulation of a trip to Mars, and wound up experiencing sleep disturbances and becoming more sedentary. John Matson reports

Opening the door to the paying public means that less healthy individuals will soon have access to space--if their doctors approve. John Matson reports

The Cassini orbiter spotted a river system on Titan that NASA likens to a miniature version of the Nile River, but flowing with liquid ethane and methane. John Matson reports

NASA has plans for another Mars rover, but no trips scheduled for exotic places like Titan or Europa. John Matson reports

A proof-of-concept 3-D printing job using lunarlike material shows that quick-and-dirty tools or spare parts could be manufactured on the moon. John Matson reports

Global 3-D climate simulations for plausible Martian atmospheres show that even with a much thicker CO2 layer, the greenhouse effect could not have warmed Mars above freezing. John Matson reports.

Thanks to gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies, the light emitted by a small galaxy 13.3 billion years ago has reached Earth. John Matson reports

A planet at least seven times as massive as Earth orbits comfortably in the habitable zone of the star HD 40307. John Matson reports

Fomalhaut b looked like an exoplanet to some astronomers and like dust to others. But new analyses strengthen the planet view. John Matson reports

A chemical analysis of lunar samples now points to the solar wind being behind the ultrathin dusting of water molecules first detected in 2009 from spacecraft measurements. John Matson reports

An analysis of the Huygens probe's sensor data has reconstructed bouncing and skidding, moments before it came to rest on Titan. John Matson reports

A star orbiting the galactic center's black hole in just 11.5 Earth years should provide data for studying how gravity works near an extremely massive object. John Matson reports

Smaller ground-based telescopes produce research results that get more citations per dollar spent than the big guys. John Matson reports

UV light, which radiates from stars and galaxies, can induce rapid changes in icy hydrocarbon molecules cooled to 5 kelvins, as on a comet. John Matson reports

In the J0651 binary system two white dwarf stars orbit each other in less than 13 minutes--and it's getting a little faster all the time. John Matson reports

On September 5th NASA's Dawn spacecraft left the asteroid Vesta and set sail for the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015. John Matson reports

NASA's infrared WISE spacecraft found about 130 glowing black holes in a small region of space, meaning that at least two million active black holes dot the sky. John Matson reports

Only about 0.5 percent of Milky Way-like galaxies have companions like our satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds. John Matson reports

The twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes will fly through the Van Allen Belts for two years, measuring charged particles, plasma waves and magnetic fields. John Matson reports