Project Jigsaw

Our solar system is littered with the debris of its creation, which argues against a cosmic creator. Or at least, if there is some deity behind all this, he's a very messy one who can't be bothered to clean up after himself. Far out on the outer edge, where it's bloody cold and there's no chance of getting a decent phone signal, is the Kuiper belt, a region littered with the rubble left over from the formation of our sun and the worlds that orbit around it.

However, clever people who know about this stuff suggest that some of these cosmic offcuts - asteroids the size of a small town, right down to objects only a few metres across - could be the remains of a planet that disintegrated during that chaotic time when our solar system was still young. Quite how a planet disintegrates is not known. Current thinking ranges from cosmic collisions, to suggestions that the rocks weren't sticky enough, right down to the tinfoil helmet brigade who reckon it was zapped apart by alien space lasers.

Seas made of jam

Now NASA's Project Jigsaw aims to solve the riddle once and for all, by tracking down all the pieces and sticking them back together. Speculation is rife about what such a planet may look like: a gas giant, an Earth-like planet or maybe some exotic body where it rains diamonds into seas made of jam.

"Computer projections have been inconclusive," explains Dr Ruth Gimbal, the project's lead analyst. "Just like any other jigsaw, if you haven't kept the box lid, you're working in the dark. But as long as we take a methodical approach, we should have a reasonable chance of success."

A robotic spacecraft, Dozer 1, will begin by looking for the corners, just in case we're dealing with a planet that is cube shaped. If it doesn't find any straight bits, the spacecraft will start with the curved edges of the planet and progress from there. The mission is expected to take at least twenty years, although NASA will be able to make early predictions as soon as the planet begins to take shape.

As ever with projects like this, conspiracy theorists have taken an unnatural interest in the mission - those tinfoil hats again. Claims that there is insufficient mass to create a planet have resulted in some armchair theorists speculating that this particular cosmic jigsaw has several pieces missing. These, they say, have most probably been taken away by aliens, possibly as souvenirs. More unhinged individuals are even suggesting that the planet might have been shoddily built by aliens in the first place, and that the mission will find discarded alien tools, surplus planet-building materials and traffic cones.

Taken from The University of the Bleeding Obvious Annual 2022
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