Planet Plans

Four men who hope some day to flit from planet to planet in rocket planes were last week making preparations to leave the earth. Inventor Maurice Poirer of Burbank, Calif., fired a miniature moon-plane from the top of a mountain, watched it crash to the bottom of San Francisquito Canyon. In Italy a 132-lb. rocket designed by another U. S. rocketeer, Dr. Darwin O. Lyon, exploded, seriously injured four mechanics. In Vienna, the Meteorological Institute of Urania heard Professor Hermann Oberth tell how he hoped to reach Mars or Jupiter within 15 years. In Manhattan the Interplanetary Society, an organization of lunar and planetary aspirants whose members include Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard, Clark University rocketeer (TIME, July 29, 1929), and Sir George Hubert Wilkins, arctic-antarctic explorer, listened to a paper by Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie, French rocket authority now in the U. S. to find money for his experiments. Dr. Esnault-Pelterie cheered the Interplanetary Society by predicting a successful lunar landing within 25 years.

If Inventors Poirer, Lyon, Oberth and Esnault-Pelterie had had their rocket planes in readiness last week, they might have reached a planet with a short jaunt of only 16 million miles. The tiny asteroid Eros passed closer to the earth than any other body except the moon and an occasional comet ever comes. Men could see it with strong binoculars, scrutinize it with telescopes.

Only 17 mi. in diameter, Eros is one of the smallest members of the large family of minor planets which number over 1,000. Almost all the group follow orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Eros, however, does not travel in a conventional asteroid path, wanders sometimes between Mars and Jupiter, sometimes between Mars and Earth. Discovered in 1898 by Dr. Gustav Witt at the Urania Observatory in Berlin, the small planet was given a masculine name because of its eccentric orbit. According to astronomical custom, only asteroids which move in an ordinary orbit are given feminine names. The cycle of Eros' motion with relation to Earth is 81 years. In 1975 it will approach even nearer than this year, will again be a handy though tiny target for rocketeers.

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