Enlarge / The robots exploring a simulated alien environment. (credit: ETH Zurich / Takahiro Miki )

While rovers have made incredible discoveries, their wheels can hold them back, and erratic terrain can mean damage. There is no replacing something like Perseverance , but sometimes rovers could use a leg up, and they could get that from a small swarm of four-legged robots.

They look like giant metal insects, but the trio of ANYmal robots customized by researchers at ETH Zurich was tested in environments as close to the harsh lunar and Martian terrain as possible. Robots capable of walking could assist future rovers and mitigate the risk of damage from sharp edges or loss of traction in loose regolith. Not only do the ANYmals’ legs help them literally step over obstacles, but these bots work most efficiently as a team. They are each specialized for particular functions but still flexible enough to cover for each other—if one glitches, the others can take over its tasks.

“Our technology can enable robots to investigate scientifically transformative targets on the Moon and Mars that are unreachable at present using wheeled rover systems,” the research team said in a study recently published in Science Robotics.

Enlarge / Falcon 9 launches 54 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 in Florida on Saturday. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.03 of the Rocket Report! Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. For decades this has meant a time to reflect on the glories of the past. But finally, with the Artemis Program, we can also look forward with hope about what is coming. That is something I am thankful for.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab recovers another booster . The launch company's Electron rocket boosted seven satellites for NASA, Space Flight Laboratory, and Spire Global on Tuesday. This was Rocket Lab's 39th launch overall, and after the primary mission Electron's first stage completed a successful ocean splashdown. Rocket Lab’s recovery team rendezvoused with the stage on the water, successfully bringing it onto a vessel using a specially designed capture cradle, the company said .

Enlarge / The dusty debris from the DART collision dominates this image, but there are boulders present, too. (credit: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA) )

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission was a success from the perspective of planetary defense, as it successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid . But the mission had a scientific element to it, and we're still sifting through the debris of the collision to determine what the impact tells us about the asteroid. That's difficult due to the distance to the asteroid and the low amounts of light that reflect off the debris.

Today, a paper was released by a team that analyzed images of the aftermath using the Hubble Space Telescope. They've spotted dozens of boulders that collectively would have originally made up 0.1 percent of the mass of Dimorphos, DART's target. And while they're all moving very slowly from the site of the collision, some of them should be able to escape the gravity of the double asteroid system.

Knocking rocks

The images taken by DART immediately prior to its demise suggest that Dimorphos was a rubble pile, a mixture of boulders, small rocks, and dust barely held together by their mutual gravitational pull. So what happens when a relatively solid object, like the DART spacecraft, hammers an asteroid at high speed?

Enlarge / Nine main engines propel a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket off its launch pad earlier this year. (credit: SpaceX )

The US Space Force, long content with using just one or two contractors to carry the military’s most vital satellites into orbit, has announced it will seek a third provider for national security launch services in its next multibillion-dollar round of rocket procurement.

This is good news for Blue Origin, which has long sought to join the ranks of United Launch Alliance and SpaceX as the military’s preferred launch contractors. The Space Force has spent the last few months refining how it will purchase launch services for military satellites and National Reconnaissance Office spy payloads in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

Pardon the jargon

In February, the Space Force unveiled a “dual-lane” acquisition strategy that will include two tiers of space missions.

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The Pew Research Center published the results of a new public survey on Thursday, the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The survey assessed Americans' attitudes toward space exploration and space policy issues.

Similarly to five years ago , the survey found that Americans broadly support the national space agency, NASA. Three-quarters of respondents had a favorable opinion of NASA, compared to just 9 percent with an unfavorable opinion.

However, as several previous surveys have found, the public has far different priorities for NASA than are expressed in the space agency's budget. In this new report, based on a large survey of 10,329 US adults, the highest support came for "monitor asteroids, other objects that could hit the Earth" (60 percent) and "monitor key parts of the Earth's climate system" (50 percent). Sending astronauts to the Moon (12 percent) and Mars (11 percent) lagged far behind as top priorities for respondents.

Enlarge / Most of the explanations for this phenomenon involve a neutron star, depicted above. These explanations are uniformly terrible. (credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY )

On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10, behaves a bit like a pulsar, sending out regular bursts of radio energy. But the physics that drives pulsars means that they'd stop emitting if they slowed down too much, and almost every pulsar we know of blinks at least once per minute.

GPM J1839–10 takes 21 minutes between pulses. We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.

A persistent transient

GPM J1839–10 was discovered in a search of the galactic plane for transient objects—something that's not there when you first look, but appears the next time you check. The typical explanation for a transient object is something like a supernova, where a major event gives something an immense boost in brightness. They're found at the radio end of the spectrum, fast radio bursts , but are also very brief and, so, fairly difficult to spot.

Enlarge / Commander of US Space Command General James Dickinson testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 8, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The leader of the United States Space Command, an Army general named James H. Dickinson, said Wednesday that megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink network have played an important role in Ukraine's efforts to deter an invasion by Russia.

"We are seeing for the first time what a megaconstellation means to the world," Dickinson said. "That provides such resiliency and redundancy in terms of maintaining satellite communications in this example. That is powerful, and the department is moving in that direction."

Dickinson made his remarks at the Aspen Security Forum . As leader of the Space Command, Dickinson is responsible for the command and control of all US military forces in outer space. He said Starlink had facilitated communications among Ukraine's armed forces and that other commercial companies had provided essential observation services through means such as synthetic aperture radar, which can observe at night and through clouds.