But first it must put the probe on the right path to the Gas Giant.
Then there is natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy, perhaps the most visible fracking beneficiary.
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It was recently picked to help Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant, develop Shtokman, a massive offshore gasfield.
The acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, meanwhile, has derailed plans to merge Rosneft with Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant.
Wood Group's largest division has secured a major North Sea contract extension with oil and gas giant Total.
About one-fifth of them are home to a gas giant like Jupiter or a still more massive planet.
Professor Roxburgh told BBC News there appeared to be another planet orbiting the same "sun" - a Neptune-sized gas giant.
About 28% of the fund is invested in financial stocks, and another 22% in Italy's most valuable company, oil-and-gas giant Eni.
Vekselberg built a fortune buying aluminum smelters and later acquired a 12.5% stake in Russian oil and gas giant TNK- BP.
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On 7 November, Polish gas monopoly PGNiG filed an arbitration procedure against Russia's gas giant Gazprom to demand a discount on gas imports.
The companies that showed up for the New York gala weren't Gazprom --the oil and gas giant that is Russia's largest company.
So Mr Potanin has brought in another metals magnate, Alisher Usmanov, who owns iron-ore mines and has links to Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant.
The researchers, led by Sean Raymond, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, carried out computer simulations of gas giant migration in forming planetary systems.
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He also reportedly angered his own father-in-law Viktor Zubkov, who is a former deputy prime minister and currently chairman of the state-owned gas giant Gazprom.
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Meanwhile, Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom denied reports that it had offered financial aid to Cyprus's banks in return for licences to extract natural gas.
The dispute hinges on the fact that the Russian gas giant is threatening to quadruple the price it charges for the natural gas it ships to Ukraine.
Big projects are now more or less impossible without a state-backed Russian partner, such as Rosneft or Gazprom, a state-run gas giant which has a growing oil interest.
The European Union is pressuring Russia to apply EU rules to the European operations of gas giant Gazprom, just as Russia is struggling to maintain its dominance of Europe's gas market.
The light from the planet was detected in infrared form by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which also detected the first light from another exoplanet, the gas giant HD 209458 b.
Gazprom, Russia's gas giant, is Poland's fifth-largest foreign investor.
Russian natural gas giant Gazprom announced yesterday that it had indefinitely shelved the Shtokman project in the Barents Sea because the costs of developing it would simply be too high.
They could simply be a way to put pressure on the foreign firms to do something about the cost overrun, or to encourage them to bring in Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant.
At the end of 2012, Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom sent a 66, 000-tonne cargo of LNG from Statoil's Hammerfest terminal in Norway to the Japanese port of Tobata between November 7 and December 5.
The government's recent decision to give up nuclear power and the news that Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas giant, would invest in German electricity have sharpened fears that Germany might become even more beholden to Russia.
The government is also fighting to liberalise the gas market, in line with EU rules that came into force on March 3rd, but against fierce opposition from Russia's gas giant, Gazprom, and its local proxies.
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On the plus side, the ability to directly detect light from a planet closer to the size of Earth than a Jupiter-sized gas giant is a positive step forward in our ability to learn more about planets that might be habitable.
On September 26th the group announced, in a paper posted to arXiv, an online database, that its participants had discovered two probable exoplanets, one a Jupiter-like gas giant, and the other, possibly, a smaller, rocky world about twice the diameter of Earth.
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And new software, plus the ability to vary the projected sizes and brightnesses of planets and moons, makes it possible to simulate the sky from anywhere in the solar system: to see earthrise from Mars, for example, or to watch Jupiter's moons rise and set from a vantage point just above the gas giant's cloud-tops.
Rosneft's acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, meanwhile, has derailed plans to merge the oil firm with Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant (finally and farcically cancelled this week, though the government came up with another plan that would remove restrictions on foreign ownership of Gazprom shares, a move designed to alleviate some of the pain caused by the Yukos fiasco).
"First, this icy 'super-Earth' dominates the region around its star that in our Solar System is populated by the gas-giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, " he said.
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