And here's what really happened on Boethin

Dialogue on the bridge:

Junior Officer: Your divine tentacleness, we have successfully completed the course correction. The earthlings will miss us by several million of their "kilometers". We can now safely orbit till we are behind the sun from them and switch on the main engine.

Captain: Excellent, your appendages should be redecorated in imperial purple for this. You are an example to the entire fleet. That is the way things are supposed to be done and not the way that idiot junior officer of "Holmes" turned his main engine when facing the earhlings' planet.

@anton Ivanov

Tch... puh-lease. They'd refer to several million of our brontosauruses in line with the Register's standard distance metrics - possibly even billions of linguine. Judging by some comments, the aliens are already here and reading these pages to monitor our ways.

Hartley?

there's a comet called "Hartley"?

I s'pose that Comets Topov, Octavia, and Pig are out there somewhere as well?

If they are really comets and not alien scoutships from Zeta Reticuli! Well pointed out, Anton, on the accepted usage of the Type-37 plasma induction drive whilst in primitive planetary systems.

...alternatively.

On spotting Tempel-1 being twatted by a 360 kilo hunk of metal:

"Sod *that* for a game of soldiers, I am so out of here".

Do you have Comet Spotting...

By J.R.Hartley?

One of our comets is missing!

Did HMRC have anything to do with this??

frying pan meet fire

so there was this hunk of amalgamated frozen space debris and ice hurtling safely around the galaxy until some git decides to chuck 1/3rd of a tonne of metal at it... brilliant, NOW we THINK there MIGHT be a couple of lumps of this frozen hunk of space debris careering off in different directions because we've lost sight of it entirely.

eh... that means that there is now an increased chance that at least one of those lumps is heading straight for us.

@Slaine

Indeed, however if HMRC had anything to do with it at least you're pretty much guaranteed never to find it again, and if you did it would probably be in the basement of some Russian hackers or on ebay (surprised it's not up there already)...

door's open, it's bloody cold out

@ Slaine

Nope; two different comets:

360 Kg anal probe - Tempel-1

Gone walkabout - Boethin

Er, a bit premature with the Linear-S4 obit?

"Comet LINEAR-S4 was discovered on September 27, 1999 ..."

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast05jul_1m.htm

The Hollywood Writers Strike

Is the cause of this! The aliens are coming now to discover what happened during the last episode of 'Single White Lawyer'.

Comet?

...gone to join Dancer, Prancer, Dasher, Vixen, Cupid, Donder, Blitzen and Rudolph of course.

@ Peter Lenz.....

A callback of a " Futurama " plot?

I bow to your greatness.

Single white lawyer?

Single Female Lawyer, surely?

To quote Bender:

"Single Female Lawyer, Fighting for her clients

Wearing sexy mini skirts, And being self-reliant "

I'm off to watch that again. Utter genius.

Steve stop throwing chairs!

Maybe someone nailed it with a few high speed chairs and changed its course.

... that's the IT angle