File this one under the heading "work in progress" but engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are thinking big. Really big. The idea is to build a space harpoon that can bust beneath the ...

An explosive-powered harpoon designed to skewer a comet would be the easiest way to grab a chunk of the icy body for study back on Earth, according to NASA researchers who are currently testing the ...

This is a photo of the ballista testbed preparing to fire a prototype harpoon into a bucket of material that simulates a comet. [Photo: NASA/Rob Andreoli] NASA is cooking up something new to help it ...

The best way to grab a sample of a rotating comet that is racing through the inner solar system at up to 150,000 miles per hour while spewing chunks of ice, rock and dust may be to avoid the risky ...