Meanwhile, in outer space news...

...On Wednesday, the European Space Agency will try to do the equivalent of transferring an object from one speeding bullet to another. More than 500m km away from Earth, between Jupiter and Mars, a probe named the Philae lander will be ejected from the Rosetta spacecraft and land on a comet for the first time in scientific history...

And...

Thousands of shooting stars per hour scraped a yellowed Martian sky last month as a comet blazed through the red planet's atmosphere at 35 miles per second.

Unfortunately, no one was there to experience the spectacular pass of Siding Spring on Oct. 19, and the remote images and data from the close encounter were not nearly so dramatic.

Still, the space agency has learned surprising things from its  extremely rare observations of a comet composed of the matter that formed the inner solar system, scientists said Friday