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Saturday, February 8, 2003 NASA to Build Planets An artist's rendition of an Earth-like planet. Credit: NASA NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory is going to use supercomputers to create artifical planets and simulate their development for billions of years. The idea is to find the limits in which life could survive and see how that would appear to us looking through telescopes -- so that we can better find the ones that many people believe are out there. The experiment, part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and done with contributions from Caltech, will model more familiar planets like Earth and Mars first to test its validity, and then move on to the more fantastical planets. If this experiment is successful, it will go a long way towards developing all of the technology needed to create a complete Mars terraforming simulator, of a scale even more ambitious than Jim's current project. (More info: NASA.gov) @ 15:46 EST