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Is Jupiter Dissolving Its Rocky Core?
sciencehabit writes "Jupiter is the victim of its own success. Sophisticated new calculations indicate that our solar system's largest planet, which weighs more than twice as much as all of the others put together, has destroyed part of its central core. The culprit is the very hydrogen and helium that made Jupiter a gas giant, when the core's gravity attracted these elements as the planet formed. The finding suggests that the most massive extrasolar planets have no cores at all."
Alas our current US government has sought to sink our space program so it will need to wait for another day.
You mean when they cancelled shuttle-derived boondoggle money pits?
That's actually the best way to *increase* the resources available to do real the planetary science you're talking about.
I'm glad to see the shuttle no longer leeching the life out of NASA, but you have to know the cuts go well beyond that. It's not like ditching the shuttle actually freed up more funds for NASA. Bankers need their bonuses far more than we need to do basic science, after all.