Weirdly, that title is not as big a stretch as you might think. NASA's Deep Impact space probe slammed a large copper block into a comet back in July, 2005. However, the probe sailed on, and astronomers hate to waste a good thing. So the mission was retooled, and split into two major projects: for the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI) it will continue on to observe another comet called Hartley 2, and for the EPOCh component (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization) it will observe planets around other stars. The combined mission is now called EPOXI.
The comet rendezvous isn't until 2010. Until then, EPOXI will be used to carefully observe some stars known to have massive planets. These extrasolar planets (or exoplanets for short) were discovered using ground-based telescopes. Hundreds of planets orbiting other sunlike stars have been found since the first was discovered in 1995, but some are ...
