Millions of miles from Earth, one half of a robotic space probe the size of a compact car was spending its Fourth of July holiday preparing to slam at 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet into an ancient ball of ice and rock variously described by mission scientists as a nine-mile-long "pickle" and "eggplant."

Meanwhile, hundreds of Cornell University students, faculty and Ithaca citizens were spending the wee hours of Independence Day cramming themselves into rooms on the first and third floors of Cornell's Space Sciences Building (SSB). It was there on a warm summer night that they hoped to witness a historic event, as a machine named Deep Impact had a very close encounter with a comet named Tempel 1. They also came for the ice cream.

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