[Wednesday, December 2, 2009] As of Dec. 1, four Painted Lady butterflies are living aboard the International Space Station. These "butterflynauts" are part of an educational experiment that was launched Nov. 16 on space shuttle Atlantis and transferred to the Space Station.

[Wednesday, December 2, 2009] A key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors.

[Friday, December 4, 2009] The first observations with the world's newest planet-hunter instrument on the Subaru Telescope, HiCIAO have revealed a companion to the Sun-like star GJ 758. With an estimated mass of 10-40 times Jupiter's mass

[Sunday, December 13, 2009] Eric Boyd of the Montana State University Astrobiology Biogeocatalysis Research Center (MSUABRC) recently led an expedition to Robertson Glacier to examine the microbiology and geochemistry of subglacial environments as it applies to Mars exploration.

[Monday, December 14, 2009] An international team of planet hunters has discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth.

[Monday, December 14, 2009] A collection of 30 never-before-released images of embryonic planetary systems in the Orion Nebula are the highlight of the longest single Hubble Space Telescope project ever dedicated to the topic of star and planet formation.

[Monday, December 14, 2009] A team of researchers from the Astrobiology Centre (INTA-CSIC) has shown that hydrogen cyanide, urea and other substances considered essential to the formation of the most basic biological molecules can be obtained from the salt Prussian blue.

[Monday, December 14, 2009] It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside.

[Tuesday, December 15, 2009] About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system.

[Tuesday, December 15, 2009] Catherine Weitz, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has reported new evidence for multiple, water-related geologic processes on Mars.

[Tuesday, December 15, 2009] NASA SMD and ESA intend to release in January 2010 an solicitation requesting proposals for instruments to be flown on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter with the objective of studying trace gases in the atmosphere of Mars.

[Wednesday, December 16, 2009] In this week's issue of Nature, astronomers announce the discovery of a planet around the nearby, low-mass star GJ1214

[Friday, December 18, 2009] NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan, confirming the presence of liquid on the part of the moon dotted with many large, lake-shaped basins.

[Friday, December 18, 2009] With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact.

[Friday, December 18, 2009] The presence of fog provides the first direct evidence for the exchange of material between the surface and the atmosphere, and thus of an active hydrological cycle, which previously had only been known to exist on Earth.

[Friday, December 18, 2009] Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star only 40 light-years from Earth.

[Tuesday, December 22, 2009] Two brown dwarf-sized objects orbiting a giant old star show that planets may assemble around stars more quickly and efficiently than anyone thought possible, according to an international team of astronomers.

[Monday, December 28, 2009] Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have measured the properties of a young solar system at distances closer to the star than Venus is from our sun.