On June 13, 2010, a fireball streaked over the Australian outback as a 510-kilogram spacecraft burned up on purpose while a small capsule parachuted to the ground. Nobody knew for sure whether it held anything. This episode follows the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa mission, an underdog story of cascading failures and stubborn problem-solving on the way to asteroid Itokawa and back.

We explain why a Japanese rocket failure in 2000 forced a change of target, how a record solar flare in 2003 damaged the solar cells and starved the xenon ion engines, and how two reaction wheels failed before arrival. At the rubble-pile asteroid, the Minerva mini-lander drifted into space, two touchdown attempts went wrong, and a tiny fuel leak sent the probe tumbling and silent. We describe how engineers waited for precession to stabilize the ...