NASA's Lollygagging Messenger - Of DOOM!

Well, once again the boys at NASA are playing fire with fire, putting all of us at risk of total catastrophic annihilation.

Today, the U.S. spacing agency launched a new probe to Mercury, the innerest planet. MESSENGER, a half-ton orbiting science laboratory and ridiculously contrived acronym, is due to arrive in 2011.

I know what you're thinking. 2011? Mercury is only 60 million miles away - why will it take more than six years for MESSENGER to reach its destination?

The answer - because this probe is taking the scenic route. On its way to Mercury, MESSENGER will be on a long junket around the inner solar system, buzzing by Earth and Venus a few times before finally settling down around Mercury.

So we're annoying three planets with one mission. Fantastic!

And the worst of all is the fact that we've already been there and done that! Mercury was explored by Mariner 10 in 1975. The scienticians have already collected all the data they'd ever need to know, so this is just frivolous planetary picking-on!

Mark my words: the inner planets will not be happy about this, nor will they be pleased. I predict that we will begin to see more asteroids and other space rocks hurled in our direction once MESSENGER begins circling Mercury. Mark! My! Words!

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The Legendary 10th planet Has Been Discovered!

For more than a century, Astronomers and Astrologers have searched the heavens for a hypothesized Tenth Planet located between the Sun and Mercury. Nicknamed Vulcan for its high surface temperatures, this planet was first proposed by French patent-clerk-turned-mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier in 1840, to explain the unusual perturbations in Mercury's orbit. However, attempts to find the planet have been fruitless.

Until now.

Dowling College astronomy professor Henry C. Courten has now discovered the elusive Tenth Planet. Studying telescopic images taken during an eclipse of the Sun earlier this year, Courten found conclusive proof of an intra-Mercurial planet a few hundred meters in diameter orbiting about one-tenth the Earth's distance from the Sun.

The consequences of this discovery are staggering.

Not only will this cause a complete rewriting of the science textbooks to revise our solar system from nine planets to ten, but it also throws the entire endeavor of science in doubt. If science was wrong about the number of planets orbiting the Sun, what else could it be wrong about?

In fact, it would not surprise me if this discovery fails to gain any traction in the astronomic community. Indeed, there may even be a grand conspiracy among astronomists to keep this planet's very existence a secret!

Well, I, for one, will not be silenced!

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