This sounds like the kind of NASA project the fireworks planners in my family would have dreamed up.
From the Associated Press: NASA hopes to shoot off its own celestial sparks in an audacious mission that will blast a stadium-sized hole in a comet half the size of Manhattan. It would give astronomers their first peek at the inside of one of these heavenly bodies.
If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 — about 80 million miles away from Earth at the time of impact.
...The collision is expected to occur around 1:52 a.m. EDT when the comet, traveling through space at 6 miles per second, runs over the impactor, which will be shooting some of the most close-up pictures of Tempel 1 up until its death.
The Fourth of July impact is described as being like detonating nearly five tons of TNT and could temporarily brighten the comet as much as 40 times more than normal.
