NASA Celebrates the Fourth...!

I stayed up much of last night watching our scientists prove that they could blast a hole in a comet if necessary.
It really is quite a remarkable feat when you think about it. The comet is looping between the Sun and Jupiter at about 6.5 miles per second going one direction. The "deep impact" transporting vehicle is moving at about 6 miles per second going in a converging planned orbit in another. A copper probe which is only about 40 inches long and 18 inches in diameter and weighing about 820 lbs is launched and steered at a point on the comet (about half the size of “Manhatten”) and manages to strike within 50 meters (slightly more than half the length of a football field) of its target 80 million miles away from Earth.
I was disappointed at the lack of “live” coverage of the event. No one would have been watching anyway I suppose just prior to 2 AM EDT. CNN cut away from whatever it was showing about 2 minutes before the scheduled impact to show it as “breaking news”.
The rest of America’s news organizations ignored it while it was going on.
What did the team of scientists at NASA’s California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory accomplish:
1. Ostensibly this was performed to get pieces of the innermost parts of the comet freed up in space so that spectrum analysis could be performed on their composition. The theory behind this is that the core contains minerals and elements from the earliest moments of the universe, thus a major contribution to the body of knowledge.
2. Militarily, the ability to do what I wrote about in the second paragraph. If you could substitute a nuclear weapon for the “copper” you might be able to “destroy something in space that was threatening Earth. NASA officials always steer the conversation away from this kind of talk because the US has a decades old international treaty that speaks against stuff like this. Nonetheless, many other NASA missions have had a secret military component.
An Australian reporter at the subsequent press conference said in a follow up question. “Just what is the US trying to say to the world through this demonstration?”
The NASA officials denied they were sending a message.
Yeah...right..