An ancient impact crater gives insight on a major period of climate change on earth, Enceladus spits water that could have life, and Spitzer Space Telescope is being retired. We'll check into all of these on today's Daily Space.

There where three orbital launches last week!  Annie brings the audience up to speed about the two Chinese launches and Arianespace's hefty passengers on the Ariane 5.  She also rehashes the SpaceX Crew Dragon In Flight Abort test and explains why the Crew Dragon isn't quite ready for human-rated flight yet.

This weekend SpaceX purposely exploded a Falcon9 to test the Crew Dragon abort system and as everything went as planned, and we discuss what is next - maybe - for the SpaceX human space program. From there, we look at two new comets from other solar systems, nitrogen in comets from our solar system, and then take the promised deep dive into news about our Galaxy’s Sag A*.

25 years after the discovery of exoplanets, and more than 4000 planets later we’re still getting press releases on new planets. In this episode we argue planet discoveries are now science as usual. We then take a look at how the ash from fires and the Tael Volcano are changing the color of the sunset, and for some the color of our days.

Today’s news is all about weird stuff having a bad evolution. From the discovery of an asteroid destined to self-destruct on Venus or Mercury to comets bringing phosphorus to Earth one impact a time, to binary stars getting merged and pulled apart by Sag A* - let’s just say it’s a violent news day. 

It's been a busy week! SpaceX counts like a computer, SpaceX now the largest satellite operator. One of the Starlinks isn't like the others? China launches a super secret satellite. Mighty mice and space cookies return to Earth!

 Betelgeuse is still fading and we all have dreams of supernovae dancing through our heads. As we imagine what could be, we look at the cause of gamma ray bursts. We also look at how some think one star - nu Indi - is enough to get a timestamp on the collision of the Milky Way with the Gaia-Enceladus dwarf galaxy. We end things with a brief look at new climate change research none of us probably want to read, but we all need to understand.

It is Monday, and for many of us, it is the first normal week of the new year. Kids are returning to college, astronomers are returning from AAS, and TV shows are returning from hiatus. As we try to figure out what normal is going to look like for 2020, we here at the Daily Space want to remind you - that new normal probably doesn’t include aliens.

From Jupiter escalating hostilities towards Earth, to the Moon being in Earth's shadows, to checking on on the Arecibo Observatory as it recovers from the earthquake in Puerto Rico - we're catching up on some of the real world events that have happened during AAS this week.

The American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting came to an end yesterday, but it is going to take us the rest of this week to get through even the highlights of what has happened. This week was full of controversy, existential crisis, and a diversity of non-stop science.