Hayabusa launched in 2003 to do something never attempted: land on an asteroid, grab material, and bring it home. Nearly everything went wrong. Solar flares degraded its power. Two of three reaction wheels failed. Its lander missed. The sampling mechanism likely never fired. It lost contact for seven weeks. Three of four ion engines broke — and engineers wired the working halves of two dead engines together to limp home, three years late.

In June 2010 the capsule streaked over the Australian outback carrying about 1,500 microscopic grains of asteroid Itokawa — the first asteroid samples in history. In Japan the mission is folklore now: the probe that came home.

Hayabusa2 was the sequel with the lessons learned — and a cannon. At asteroid Ryugu it deployed three hopping rovers and a lander, fired a copper slug into the surface to excavate a fresh crater, and collected both surface and subsurface material. The samples landed in Australia in December 2020: 5.4 grams of carbon-rich asteroid, containing amino acids and even uracil — one of the letters of RNA — delivered from deep space to a clean room.

The spacecraft, healthy and frugal with fuel, was simply given a new assignment: it's cruising toward another asteroid now.

Lunar landings have historically aimed at ellipses kilometers wide. SLIM — the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon — set out in 2024 to prove "pinpoint" landing: within 100 meters of target. It did it. An engine nozzle failure in the final descent left it resting nose-down, solar panels facing the wrong way — and the story became very JAXA: a palm-sized baseball-shaped robot the lander had tossed out photographed the scene, and when the Sun's angle changed, SLIM woke up and did its science. It then survived multiple lunar nights it was never designed to endure.

Precision landing is the quiet key to everything the Moon programs want next — the ice, the caves, the poles. Japan demonstrated it first.