A washing-machine-sized robot bounced across a comet and lived to transmit

In 2014, after a ten-year, 6.4-billion-kilometre chase, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft dropped its lander Philae onto comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Philae's anchoring harpoons failed to fire, and it bounced nearly a kilometre across the surface before settling in a shadowed crevice, still managing to send back the first data ever collected from a comet's surface.

— European Space Agency, Philae (spacecraft) — Rosetta mission, landed 12 November 2014