Too Close To The Sun

Maybe they should have called it Icarus! This story is about Genesis, the space probe sent to collect solar data. It crashed in the desert instead of being "caught" by a plane as was NASA's plan. In other space news, two new planets have been discovered that are not gas giant like Jupiter, but resemble icy, rocky planets like Neptune. As our telescopic prowess increases, our ability to detect Earth-size planets becomes possible:

September 2, 2004:

The race to find distant new “Earths” heated up considerably yesterday with the detection of two of the smallest planets ever detected outside the Solar System. Whereas previous extrasolar planets discovered were almost exclusively gas giants, similar in Jupiter and Saturn and between 100 and 300 times the mass of the Earth, the newly found planets are much smaller – only 15 to 20 Earth masses. This places them in the mass range of Uranus and Neptune, somewhere between the gas giants and the small rocky planets ofthe inner Solar System. “We can’t see the Earth-like planets yet,” summed up Paul Butler of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute, who was involved in both discoveries; “but we can see their big brothers”

One of the planets was found by the veteran planet-hunting team led by Butler and Geoff Marcy of U.C. Berkeley, the group responsible for detecting the majority of the 135 or so planets discovered to date beyond our Solar System. The planet orbits the M class red dwarf star Gliese 436, located only 33 light years away, in our own galactic neighborhood. Like many of the known extrasolar planets, Gliese 436’s companion remains very close to its star, completing each revolution in a mere two and a half days at a distance of 4.1 million miles. Most significantly, the planet’s minimum mass is only 21 Earth masses, equal to 1.2 “Neptunes.”

When Jon Stewart heard about this, he said, "Hmm...33 light years - that means it would take us only about 500 years to get there!" I was so disheartened, I said to my wife, "That's under current propulsion systems."