After a year of orbital study, the probe was at the end of its operational lifespan, and controllers decided it might as well go out with a bang. Of science! They used the last of the propellant to start a slow dive toward the surface, to take as many pictures as possible on the way down and to teach these Near Earth asteroids that they're not the only ones in the solar system that can go around slamming into things. As an orbiter, NEAR Shoemaker had less landing gear than a fish and was even less likely to survive. They'd only slowed it down so they'd know exactly when to high five and aim middle fingers at the sky.

NASA
This is for the dinosaurs, asshole!

So when NEAR Shoemaker sent signals asking "OK, I'm down, what's next?" they had to think of something very quickly, to make sure the unkillable spacebot didn't work out that they'd just tried to murder it. NASA begged extra time from the Deep Space Network communications array, otherwise the probe would have come back to find out why they stopped returning its calls. A gamma ray spectrometer designed to work at a range of kilometers was reprogrammed for the slightly more in-your-face 10 centimeters. NEAR Shoemaker continued to send unprecedented data for another 16 days, and spent the whole time wondering when they'd let it deploy the drills and nuclear warheads.

It worked so well that NASA designed another probe to ram a comet on purpose. And just to take the piss out of movies that weren't as cool as what they do, they called it Deep Impact.

The impact threw up a plume of material 10 miles high, and because the mission was apparently directed by Hollywood, LCROSS then dove through the exploding cloud, to scan it, before ramming the moon as well, to be awesome. This second explosion was observed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which unaccountably failed to explode in sheer harmonic awesomeness. This suicide science found that the shadowed crater walls contained 5 percent water, as well as hydrocarbons, sulfur compounds, mercury, ammonia, hydrogen and various other substances more chemically exciting than an entire rave because they're on the moon.

NASA
Rocket science is even more awesome in reverse.

This wasn't the first time science double outperformed Michael Bay (bigger explosions and physically possible). The Apollo 13 mission threw their empty Stage IVB booster on the moon to perform seismic measurements, and to make sure the moon didn't think it was getting away that easily. The impact was used to calibrate the lunar seismic sensors installed by Apollos 11 and 12, and was so cool that the next four Apollos did the same. Astronauts are so awesome, they can even turn throwing their empties out of a moving vehicle into science. This network recorded more than 13,000 seismic events to help map the interior of the moon. That's over a thousand events per IQ point of all the people who don't think we landed there. Put together.

NASA
The next time someone says science is boring, feel free to slap them.

That's when Armstrong noticed that the jittery computer was about to pull a younger-sister Mario by relentlessly steering them to death. The programmed landing site had looked fine under telescope observation, but was full of lander-destroying boulders under "inside that lander" observation. With a few hundred thousand miles on the clock and less than a minute of fuel remaining, Neil was damned if he was turning the car around and going home. So as well as being the first person on the moon, he got to be the first person to save space by pulling manual override and steering the ship himself. With a life expectancy measured in seconds, he and Buzz calmly surveyed the surface of the moon and found the most important parking space in history.

The Venusian atmosphere is a fairly good approximation of hell, at over 400 degrees Celsius, with over 90 times Earth's pressure and sporting clouds of sulfuric acid. Venera 4 parachuted through it, permanently establishing a Soviet who was cooler than James Bond. It was crushed by atmospheric pressure before hitting the surface, so how did they prepare Venera 5? They made its parachutes smaller.

via NASA
Venera 4: Try not to think of those clawed hands gripping your skull while the center bit drills. And how we gave it reason to do that.

You see, Venera 4 had accidentally lived a full and happy life, running out of power while still in the Venusian atmosphere. But ground control wanted to see the ending of the humanity vs. Venus fight. Venera 5 was designed to fall faster, so that it would still be alive to tell us what being crushed to death on another world felt like. Venera 5 is also the origin story for every space robot that wants to kill us.

via NASA
And looks the part.

Then Venera 6 slammed into the ground beside it. Then 7 soft-landed and reported on the surface. So did 8. And 9. And 10. Then the United States noticed that there was another planet up there and sent the Venus Multiprobe to blast a shotgun of science at the entire world. It fired four pellets of pure space technology at the planet, and we're not saying they weren't expected to survive, but three of them didn't even have parachutes. And in true American action movie style, one of those expendable grunts was the only one to survive. The "Day probe" survived for almost an hour on the alien surface, while the elite "Large probe," with its fancy parachute and extra equipment, was never heard from again. Probably captured by the Venera probes and later rescued by Space-Rambo.

Then Venera 12 landed. Then 11 (space trajectory math is harder than counting). Then 13, and 14, and the Vega 2 lander. If we ever do make it to Venus, we're going to need heat shields, atmospheric defenses and some stunningly good arguments in favor of capitalism.

The Pathfinder landing system reads like the plot of a Bond movie: crashing through the atmosphere at 17,000 miles per hour, blowing off a heat shield, rappelling down a zip line to get out of range of the rocket motors, then firing three more solid rocket motors to inflate the airbags. Rocket motor-powered airbags. Just to prove that there's nothing NASA can't make cool.

Getty
"Man, even crashing a motorbike into an office feels boring compared to rocket science."

Then they dropped a quarter of a billion dollars of science from five stories straight up, because you can do that when:
a) you're on another planet with less than half Earth's gravity and
b) you're capable of doing a quarter of a billion dollars of science and therefore know what you're doing.

It hit the ground at around 30 miles per hour, pulled an 18-G impact (47 Mars-G), bounced back up four stories, bounced more than 14 more times, then landed exactly on its desired base (even though it didn't need to) and presumably went "Ta-da!"

NASA
The Sojourner looks like a polished skateboard, and by our calculations it just scored 5 million points in the gymnastics event. Also: Coolest Hot Wheels base of ALL TIME.

The landing platform alone was so much solid science that it was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. So the next time you're impressed by a medal, just remember the real priorities: Sagan has an exoplanetary station, a flower of pure science and technology that unfurled its petals to let us drive on another world.

NASA
Our single science-rose wasn't red because Mars already has plenty of that.

The system worked so well, they used it again for Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. But when you want to drop a nuclear-powered tank on alien soil, you need something even cooler.