rare bird

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 gia...