How much cost reduction is debatable. A significant part of the payload for a manned mission has to be devoted towards keeping the living cargo....well... living. Apollo wasn't a mision about national prestige... it was simply stark fear. That did get kind of muted after the crash of Luna 15, and space eventually became a cooperative venture between the two powers. The Soviet Union even supplied the flight path of Luna 15 to ensure Apollo would not collide with it. That itself is places the Soviet Union as a corrobative witness to the moonflight.

"Hey Jupiter, I'm feeling a bit lightheaded.. can you lend some of your gravity please?"

It would have taken a lot of Lunokhod missions true, but most likely it would have been at a much lower cost. Not to mention safety. The last three Apollo missions weren't canceled out of cost issues, but the realization that the NASA had been playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette when they could have easily lost an Apollo crew to solar flares as depicted in the fate of Apollo 18 in Jame's Michner's "Space". The loss of an Apollo crew would have been considered a propaganda disaster in the Cold War tainting the U.S. only real "first" in the space race, so having shown that we could repeatedly send men to the moon, the decision was quietly made to end it at 17.

Our luck with the Ranger program wasn't much better. We sent 9 Ranger probes to the Moon. Only the last three returned any usable photos.

More importantly, the Russians who had ample reason to do so... have never challenged the Apollo accomplishment.

Actually, Nixon prolonged that war when it could have ended in 1968. Deciding that a successful peace treaty would have been too big an electoral advantage for the Democrats, he sabotaged the peace conference by targeted messages to both sides of the table, effectively killing the peace process.

It would always be by mass, since it's pretty much nearly impossible to actually get a reading on the radius. Also physics pretty much determines what happens when you've got a gas giant of that mass.

Mention Star Trek or Doctor Who in a science thread and you effectively Goodwined it.

Those are objects known as Brown Dwarfs which would put them at a different category than Jovian planet. I believe that the minimum mass to establish fusion is something on the order of one tenth solar mass. Brown Dwarves radiate Infared radiation due to heat from residual gravitational collapse. Presumably the standard is considerably higher than Jupiter which also radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.

That would be kind of tricky. The planet is moving at escape velocity from it's original star, in most cases, encountering another solar system would have it either just passing through, or it would wind up in a very eccentric orbit. which would not necessarily be in the same plane as the local ecliptic.

Actually we still don't know enough about stellar formation to determine how far from the norm, the Solar System actually is. The reason that we find so many oddball systems and planets is that those are the easiest systems and planets to find. We are in a form golden area of our Galaxy, far enough from the galactic center that we're not subject to it's nasty radiation and stellar activity, yet not so far that we'd lack in heavy elements. Keep in mind also that most planet detection methods rely on the target solar system being oriented edge on towards us so the planet can intercept the star's light by passing between it and us. That's going to leave a lot out.

Only if that information is catalogued, notated, and distributed in a useful manner, which they may not be devoting manpower or other resources to do.

While much of that data is probably useful in a scientific sense, a catalog of emission numbers and coordinates is not exactly the sexy sell to the public that Hubble pictures were.

"Different EM spectrum." That really makes my day. That's right up there with "Heisenberg Compensator". Lets hear it for Trek Science!

I've been running this screen saver on various machines for years. Last night, I took look at it running data from 2009, and I've been wondering? Are they recycling old data? And more to the point since there are other Bionic projects out there, is there a more fruitful use for my computer's spare cycles? Something that might actually have an expectation of positive return to humanity. At the very least, seti is going to have to start sharing time with other more relevant Bionic projects. I'm still thinking of terminating my participation altogether, as much as I still have enthusiasm for space itself.