Whatever Michael Bay uses to propel that "high-concept" imagination of his, he's obviously passed some of it to the boys at NASA's Goddard Space Flight center. A team there is developing a hollow-bodied harpoon that can be fired from a cannon toward comets too dangerous to land on. Once landed, it fills up with sub-surface samples before winched back aboard the waiting space craft. It's currently being tested by firing the harpoon (using a six foot ballista) into a bucket of dirt -- if they fired it horizontally it'd travel about a
