On September 22, 2001, NASA’s Deep Space 1 skimmed just 2,200 kilometers past the nucleus of Comet Borrelly. While it returned unprecedented portraits of an icy, primordial wanderer, the encounter was far more than an imaging run—it was a trial by fire for radical spaceflight technologies. Deep Space 1 was built as an interplanetary testbed for twelve high-risk systems, chief among them an electrostatic ion thruster and 'AutoNav,' an onboard autonomous optical navigation engine. Instead of waiting for laggy, high-latency commands from Earth millions of miles away, the probe processed images locally in real time to steer itself through the blinding dust of the comet's coma. By surviving Borrelly unassisted, Deep Space 1 graduated electric propulsion and edge-computed robotic autonomy from experimental sci-fi concepts into essential tools of modern deep-space exploration.