So, you’ve got some sweet bottle rockets you smuggled in from Tennessee, do you? Yeah, you got nothin’. Neither does Thunder Over Louisville this year as NASA’s going to blow up a comet. Time to deep impact: T minus, umthey’re going to do it at 1:52 Monday, kicking off the fireworks display in style.

The comet’s not really bothering anybody, just cruising along at a blistering 23,000 miles per hour somewhere in the vicinity of Earth. Tempel 1, as the comet has been named, is about half the size of Manhattan.

Deep Impact is the name of the spacecraft duo that NASA launched to see if they could blow it up. Presumably, neither Ben Affleck nor Bruce Willis were selected for the suicide mission that will be completely automated.

Deep Impact consists of two crafts-one about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle that’s going to have about 13 minutes to take pictures of the event before comet entrails obliterate it; and another companion spacecraft about the size of a washing machine that is the actual detonator.

This, in effect, is like throwing a penny at a semi truck really, really hard.

But NASA scientists aren’t looking to destroy the cosmic vagabond all together. The goal is to partially blow it up, taking the lid off of the treasure chest of information inside.

Deep Impact is a $333 million project aimed at unlocking the secrets of the universe. Comets are believed to be made up of some of the most primitive material in the universe, leftovers from its inception.

The 820-pound impactor craft will be released to fly head-on at the comet on July 3rd, 24 hours before impact. The impact is expected to create a crater 3 or 4 football fields in size, stripping away ice, dust and gas from the surface to reveal what’s underneath. The explosion is not expected to alter the orbit of the comet in any way.

The nearby flyby spacecraft will take pictures of the event with medium and high resolution imagers and an infrared spectrometer and send the images back to Earth. In addition the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory will be observing and recording the impact.

In addition to information about the make-up of comets, the data collected will also give scientists clues as to the viability of destroying or redirecting comets and asteroids in the event one is on a path to collide with Earth.