Guy Laliberte has made history today by becoming the first clown to be sent in to space. Whilst missions to take circus performers into orbit has been NASA's agenda for some years, Guy Laliberte was hurried into orbit following an intergalactic incident in which Mercury called Jupiter 'Fat'.

Whilst other planets may brushed off such mindless name calling, Jupiter - who has been dealing with weight issues for several millennia - took the issue to heart and immediately entered a spiral of depression which the world's leading astronomers fear it may never recover from.

NASA concluded that it needed to take immediate action and once it determined a basket of kittens would probably not survive the four year journey - and would almost certainly have grown in to less cute adult cats if they did - the decision was made to send a popular light hearted entertainer to cheer up the upset gas giant.

Whilst many are critical of NASA's plan, they are acutely aware of the repercussions should Jupiter's mood not improve. One fear is that Jupiter may stop snacking on passing asteroids in an effect to starve itself down to a slimmer figure - if this were to happen all of these space-snacks would simply pass straight on and bombard Earth, killing humans like the dinosaurs.

A worse case scenario is if Jupiter simply ran away altogether; this would leave it's moons without a father figure and they would undoubtedly wreak havoc around the solar in the early hours of the morning keeping all the other planets up.

NASA is also considering what actions to take against Mercury; this is not it's first instance of trouble making. Recently, Mercury borrowed Saturn’s rings claiming it needed to use them in an inter planetary hula-hooping competition. However, this was soon discovered to be a lie when they were spotted for sale on eBay.

Most famously though, it was Mercury who started the rumour the rumours that Pluto was not really a planet. It even went as far as to bribe Earth officials into designating a dwarf planet in official press releases. Pluto was so depressed by the whole affair it moved its orbit out of line with all the other planets and hasn't spoken to anybody since.