Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> (Also, Jupiter isn't a planet, it's a star that didn't ignite properly, 
> but anyway...)

It's not classified as a star. It's classified as a gas giant, which is
a type of planet.

An even stranger tidbit of trivia: When they want to send a probe to
the inner planets, such as Mercury, they have to actually make the
probe go to Jupiter for a gravity assist to slow it down enough so
that it will start falling towards the Sun. Else it would take too
freaking long. (It is, in fact, basically as hard to make a probe
fall towards the Sun as it is to make it go towards the outer planets.
We are, after all, orbiting the Sun.)

But that's not the hard part. The hard part is to make it then start
orbiting the target planet. It requires pretty clever and contrived
manoeuvering to succeed. The probe is basically falling towards the
Sun at a staggering speed, so it's like trying to catch a bullet
with a net.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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