The European Space Agency's Philae lander spent more than ten years riding aboard Rosetta before dropping onto Comet 67P on November 12, 2014, and almost nothing went to plan. A dead cold gas thruster, harpoons that never fired, and a momentum wheel that shut off too early sent the 100 kilogram probe bouncing a full kilometer into space, tumbling end over end, with only a six centimeter per second margin below escape velocity. Two hours later it came to rest wedged in a shadowed crevice named Abydos, tilted 30 degrees with one leg pointing at the sky.

This episode follows Philae's story as a biography of a machine: the last minute target change from Comet Wirtanen to 67P, the shock absorbers engineered into its carbon fiber struts, the frantic 60 hour science campaign on a dying battery, and the surprise discoveries that came from failure.  ...