Some people get paid to do the strangest things

I'd love to work for someone like NASA, spending all day coming up with ideas like radio controlled cars on Mars, scramjets and space-based advertising. The latest is the incredibly names "Deep Impact", a plan to fire a bin at a commet and take pics of the crash. Of course, to get the movie tie in, they needed to choose a mission name that hadn't already been made into a movie. Wired covers this, but no pics unfortunately. They do have a side about some folks camping on a beach in Honalulu to watch it. The quote defines the whole attitude to this sort of stuff among the tax paying public;

"It's almost like one of those science fiction movies," said Steve Lin, a Honolulu physician.

Uh, great, but the effects weren't as good as in the original...


view from the dustbin 5 minutes from impact, doesn't look too threatening...


... 90 seconds, oh fuck, oh fuck ...


BOOM!

Of course NASA say it won't cause the commet to change course and end up in the Atlantic (or on Paris, ooh, there's an idea). but I will have dreams of butterfly wings for weeks to come.
It didn't stop some mad Russian astrologer from suing NASA because;

"it is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit and associated ephemera will change after the explosion, which interferes with my practice of astrology and deforms my horoscope,"

Yes yes fuck off and stroke your crystals you mad old cow.

Bomber out